Dabo

Erik Bates | October 23, 2019
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | October 24, 2019
I saw the news story and loved it. What a great example of sportsmanship. When it occurred to me to make a goo about it, I hesitated, since there must have been many other cases of runners helping competitors across the finish line, and I didn't want players to get confused and guess the wrong one. But I thought the flag colors visible in the image might help to narrow it down, and of course I didn't obscure his face too much. A few players got it, but some streaks were definitely broken. I should have raised the difficulty rating.

Scott Hardie | October 28, 2019
After talking it over with Russ Wilhelm, who provided quite a bit of evidence, I'm now convinced that the source image of the goo is not Dabó, but some other Guinean athlete whose identity we cannot determine.

When the goo is someone obscure who got 15 minutes of fame all of a sudden, there's a high likelihood that photographs of them are mislabeled online, so I take extra effort to verify them. This image of a man's face with the Guinean colors on his wristband came up when I started making the goo of Dabó, but I knew I couldn't trust it. I did another search on another service and got the same image as a result for Dabó, and I compared the facial features and they looked like a match to me. I was 99% sure it was Dabó and proceeded with it.

But Russ's evidence is more convincing. A closer study of the facial features, and knowledge of football (soccer), and the lack of that image now coming back in searches for Dabó all point to it being someone else, probably a football player. Russ explained how his guess for a specific football player lined up with the goo's clue, and I can see why he made the guess that he did.

I considered using an image of Dabó from the race where he helped his opponent, but I was worried that with both men in the frame, players would have guessed the other runner. Plus, the close-up on his face was just a better photo.

It's a shame that this kind of photographic mix-up happened at all, but unfortunately it's a part of the game that I cannot completely avoid. It's also a shame that the correction came now, after the goo was expired, too late to give players time to re-guess.

I'm sorry once again for this sort of problem, friends. Russ, thank you for taking the time to talk to me about it.

Erik Bates | October 28, 2019
[hidden by request]