Related papers: Evolution of World Running Record Performances for…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Predicting the future performance of young runners is an important research issue in experimental sports science and performance analysis. We analyse a data set with annual seasonal best performances of male middle distance runners for a…
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…
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,…
Fluctuations of the human heart beat constitute a complex system that has been studied mostly under resting conditions using conventional time series analysis methods. During physical exercise, the variability of the fluctuations is…
A quasi-physical model (having both physical and mathematical roots) of sprint performances is presented, accounting for the influence of drag modification via wind and altitude variations. The race time corrections for both men and women…
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…
A multiplicative effects model is introduced for the identification of the factors that are influential to the performance of highly-trained endurance runners. The model extends the established power-law relationship between performance…
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…
The statistics of records for a time series generated by a continuous time random walk is studied, and found to be independent of the details of the jump length distribution, as long as the latter is continuous and symmetric. However, the…
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…
Wearable devices record physiological and behavioral signals that can improve health predictions. While foundation models are increasingly used for such predictions, they have been primarily applied to low-level sensor data, despite…
Physical exercise has significant benefits for humans in improving the health and quality of their lives, by improving the functional performance of their cardiovascular and respiratory systems. However, it is very important to control the…
Excited random walks (ERWs) are a self-interacting non-Markovian random walk in which the future behavior of the walk is influenced by the number of times the walk has previously visited its current site. We study the speed of the walk,…
We suppose that performance is a random variable whose expectation is related to training inputs, and we study four performance measures in a statistical model that relates performance to training. Our aim is to carry out a robust…