Regatta Starting Stations – Chi-squared Continued

In the Henley Royal Regatta two teams at a time propel their boats up a river and compete to be first to go a distance. Teams get assigned to their starting stations – Berkshire or Buckinghamshire – at random. From there, it is a straight shot up the river, with the lane from each starting station being seemingly identical. I didn’t know any of this, but a reader reached out some time ago because they had noticed something odd about this, and they wanted to borrow me as a sounding board. Here’s the odd thing: the team that starts from the Berkshire station has won 53.5 % of the 7555 races in the historic data this reader looked at. This is highly unexpected. If teams are assigned at random, and the starting stations are practically equal, then the starting station of the winning team should be a coin flip. If we flip 7555 coins, we would never have as many as 53.5 % come up heads. (Continue reading the full article on the web.)