Olympic Sports (Solution)

Hi Friends! Let's look at the latest Sunday Puzzle from NPR:

This week's challenge: It comes from the puzzlemaker and editor Peter Gordon. Think of the word for a competitor in a particular Olympic sport. It's a compound word with a hyphen in the middle. Remove the hyphen. What remains are two words from a different Olympic sport. What words are these?

I've cracked this one, and I'll share the solution at the end of this post.

On a personal note: Yours truly is on the verge of becoming Dr. NaturalLanguagePuzzler. Things have been especially busy the last few weeks preparing for my PhD defense, but I plan to post a more detailed breakdown of this puzzle ASAP. I didn't write a complete solver script for this one, but I did use SBERT in masking mode and Word2Vec to generate some candidate words and the solution kind of popped out from there. If I get a chance between frantically editing slides, I'll put together a formal script and walk you through it as usual! :-)

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shot-putter ---> shot, putter

I know, I know---I too think "shot" is super generic and a bit of a stretch for this puzzle, but this is the best I could come up with and I think it's what Puzzlemaster Will Shortz is asking for here.

Catch you on the next Sunday Puzzle!

--Levi King