Related papers: Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This paper examines the scientific performance of South Africa since 1994 (post-apartheid) until 2014 in comparisons with the rest of the world, utilizing relative indicator. It provides a view over current standing of South Africa in the…
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…
Re-identifying participants in ultra-distance running competitions can be daunting due to the extensive distances and constantly changing terrain. To overcome these challenges, computer vision techniques have been developed to analyze…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Socio-demographic disparities in STEM degree outcomes impact the diversity of the UK's future workforce, particularly in fields essential for innovation and growth. Despite the importance of institution-level, longitudinal analyses in…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The mathematical model of J. Keller for predicting World Record race times, based on a simple differential equation of motion, predicted quite well the records of the day. One of its shortcoming is that it neglects to account for a…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…