In competitions involving many participants running many races, the final rank is determined by the score of each participant, obtained by adding their ranks in each individual race. The ‘statistical curse of the second half-rank’ is the observation that if the score of a participant is even modestly worse than the middle score, then its final rank will be much worse (that is, much further away from the middle rank) than might have been expected. We give an explanation of this effect...
by Jean Desbois, Stéphane Ouvry and Alexios Polychronakos.

Une version "slides" de l'article précédent... beaucoup plus accessible :o))