Related papers: Universality, limits and predictability of gold-me…
We employ the novel theory of heterogeneous extreme value statistics to accurately estimate the ultimate world records for the 100-m running race, for men and for women. For this aim we collected data from 1991 through 2023 from thousands…
The situation surrounding the Olympiads is paradoxical. On the one hand, considerable resources are spent on the Olympiads. On the other hand, there are widespread arguments about the harm of the Olympiads, often very strange ones. For…
Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…
Given that Olympic Games held over the past decade each have cost USD 8.9 billion on average, the size and financial risks of the Games warrant study. The objectives of the Oxford Olympics study are to (1) establish the actual outturn costs…
Many complex phenomena, from the selection of traits in biological systems to hierarchy formation in social and economic entities, show signs of competition and heterogeneous performance in the temporal evolution of their components, which…
An overwhelming majority of humans are right-handed. Numerous explanations for individual handedness have been proposed, but this population-level handedness remains puzzling. Here we use a minimal mathematical model to explain this…
We present a new way of estimation of the role of chance in achieving success, by comparing the empirical data from 100-meter dash competitions (one of the sports disciplines with the most stringent controls of external randomness), with…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…
Do projects learn across space and time? The Olympics, among the largest publicly funded programmes in the world, offer a unique empirical setting. Theoretically, the Games seem ideal for generating "positive learning curves," driving down…
The monitoring of judges and referees in sports has become an important topic due to the increasing media exposure of international sporting events and the large monetary sums involved. In this article, we present a method to assess the…
We study the inequality of citations received for different publications of various researchers and Nobel laureates in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics using Google Scholar data from 2012 to 2024. Citation distributions are found…
We address the problem of tracking and detecting interactions between the different groups of runners that form during a race. In athletic races control points are set to monitor the progress of athletes over the course. Intuitively, a {\it…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
The athletic achievements of African athletes in global running championships have long been subject to scientific and sociological inquiry. During the 1990s, a popular narrative emerged, suggesting that West African lineage conferred…
Anyone who has tried to memorize a one-hundred-digit number can attest that the human brain acquires abstract information slowly. However, following a three-decade increase of results at memory competitions, the best competitors manage to…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
This study examines Olympic champions characteristics on Instagram to first understand how age and gender affect the characteristics and their interrelations and second to see if the future changes in those characteristics are predictable.…
Sports organizations often want to estimate athlete strengths. For games with scored outcomes, a common approach is to assume observed game scores follow a normal distribution conditional on athletes' latent abilities, which may change over…
The use of statistical methods in sport analytics has gained a rapidly growing interest over the last decade, and nowadays is common practice. In particular, the interest in understanding and predicting an athlete's performance throughout…
Humans are routinely asked to evaluate the performance of other individuals, separating success from failure and affecting outcomes from science to education and sports. Yet, in many contexts, the metrics driving the human evaluation…