Related papers: Universality, limits and predictability of gold-me…
This paper applies existing and new approaches to study trends in the performance of elite athletes over time. We study both track and field scores of men and women athletes on a yearly basis from 2001 to 2019, revealing several trends and…
Evaluating a country's sporting success provides insight into its decision-making and infrastructure for developing athletic talent. The Olympic Games serve as a global benchmark, yet conventional medal rankings can be unduly influenced by…
The International Swimming Federation (FINA) uses a very simple points system with the aim to rank swimmers across all Olympic events. The points acquired is a function of the ratio of the recorded time and the current world record for that…
The development of sport performances in the future is a subject of myth and disagreement among experts. As arguments favoring and opposing such methodology were discussed, other publications empirically showed that the past development of…
In the Olympic Games, professional athletes representing their nations compete regardless of economic, political and cultural differences. In this study, we apply gravity model to observe characteristics, represented by distances among…
Track and field world records have risen and fallen throughout the history of the sport. A recent rash of record-breaking performances has prompted the question: "How good can we get?". This article offers a review of several attempts to…
Because the decathlon tests many facets of athleticism, including sprinting, throwing, jumping, and endurance, many consider it to be the ultimate test of athletic ability. On this view, estimating the maximal decathlon score and…
Though athletics statistics are abundant, it is a difficult task to quantitatively compare performances from different events of track, field, and road running in a meaningful way. There are several commonly-used methods, but each has its…
Professional sports enhance interaction among athletes through training groups, sponsored events and competitions. Among these, the Olympic Games represent the largest competition with a global impact, providing the participants with a…
Forecasting the number of Olympic medals for each nation is highly relevant for different stakeholders: Ex ante, sports betting companies can determine the odds while sponsors and media companies can allocate their resources to promising…
We provide scientific foundations for athletic performance prediction on an individual level, exposing the phenomenology of individual athletic running performance in the form of a low-rank model dominated by an individual power law. We…
Sport climbing, which made its Olympic debut at the 2020 Summer Games, generally consists of three separate disciplines: speed climbing, bouldering, and lead climbing. However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) only allowed one set…
World record setting has long attracted public interest and scientific investigation. Extremal records summarize the limits of the space explored by a process, and the historical progression of a record sheds light on the underlying…
Athletic performance follows a typical pattern of improvement and decline during a career. This pattern is also often observed within-seasons, as an athlete aims for their performance to peak at key events such as the Olympic Games or World…
The Olympic Games are an important sporting event with notable consequences for the general economic landscape of the host city. Traditional economic assessments focus on the aggregated impact of the event on the national income, but fail…
The Olympic Games are the largest, highest-profile, and most expensive megaevent hosted by cities and nations. Average sports-related costs of hosting are $12.0 billion. Non-sports-related costs are typically several times that. Every…
Running world records (WRs) contain information about physiological characteristics that determine running performance. The progression of WRs over time encode the evolution of these characteristics. Here we demonstrate that a previously…
Models for human running performances of various complexities and underlying principles have been proposed, often combining data from world record performances and bio-energetic facts of human physiology. Here we present a novel, minimal…
World records in athletics provide a measure of physical as well as physiological human performance. Here we analyse running records and show that the mean speed as a function of race time can be described by two scaling laws that have a…
Discussions on outstanding---positively and/or negatively---athletes are common practice. The rapidly grown amount of collected sports data now allow to support such discussions with state of the art statistical methodology. Given a…