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Inspired by the Games held in ancient Greece, modern Olympics represent the world's largest pageant of athletic skill and competitive spirit. Performances of athletes at the Olympic Games mirror, since 1896, human potentialities in sports,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Advancements in technology have recently allowed us to collect and analyse large-scale fine-grained data about human performance, drastically changing the way we approach sports. Here, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Elite football is believed to have evolved in recent years, yet systematic evidence for the pace and form of that change remains sparse. Drawing on event-level records for 13,018 matches across ten top-tier men's and women's leagues in…
Biomechanical features have become important indicators for evaluating athletes' techniques. Traditionally, experts propose significant features and evaluate them using physics equations. However, the complexity of the human body and its…
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…
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…
Team-based invasion sports such as football, basketball and hockey are similar in the sense that the players are able to move freely around the playing area; and that player and team performance cannot be fully analysed without considering…
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…
Any collection can be ranked. Sports and games are common examples of ranked systems: players and teams are constantly ranked using different methods. The statistical properties of rankings have been studied for almost a century in a…