I think this game has some sort of reverse-rubberbanding: if the game notices you are not doing well, it will purposefully lower the performance of the CPUs to make it easier for you to win. In my "Lose All Sports" run in Petaque (which is wold record unless it's rejected since the old record was 55 minutes), the CPUs hit the balls on my team closer to the centre ball, threw dead balls multiple times, hit their balls away from the centre ball, and overall performed in ways that most definitely tried to make me perform better. Different versions of this happened in Speed Skating, Tennis, Road Racing, Kendo, and Darts. All of the CPUs performed noticeably worse, and I almost won one of the games by accident from how bad the CPUs were playing.