Evolution of Athletic Records: Statistical Effects versus Real Improvements

Abstract

Athletic records represent the best results in a given discipline, thus improving monotonically with time. As has already been shown, this should not be taken as an indication that the athletes' capabilities keep improving. In other words, a new record is not noteworthy just because it is a new record, instead it is necessary to assess by how much the record has improved. In this paper we derive formulae that can be used to show that athletic records continue to improve with time, even if athletic performance remains constant. We are considering two specific examples, the German championships and the world records in several athletic disciplines. The analysis shows that, for the latter, true improvements occur in 20-50% of the disciplines. The analysis is supplementedby an application of our record estimation approach to the prediction of the maximum body length of humans for a specified size of a population respectively population group from a representative sample.

Records in stochastic processes—theory and applications

“…It turns out that only in some events the record values actually improve faster than expected on the basis of constant athletic capabilities. In 50% to 80% of all considered track and field events, Gembris et al [2,3] could not disprove their null hypothesis of a stationary distribution of athletic performances. Interestingly, in the cases where they could detect a systematic timedependence, the increase in the performance seemed to be far from linear in time.…”

“…By now, the only systematic analysis of athletic records was published by Gembris et al [2,3]. They considered the evolution of the record values of several track and field events and compared them to theoretical results for the maximal values of Gaussian i.i.d.…”

“…Instead, the progressions of some athletic record values, especially in long distance running and in throwing, are characterized by large jumps, which are probably best explained by instantaneous effects like the introduction, or the prohibition of certain drugs. In fact, while the record values of several long distance running events, like 5000m or 10000m improved drastically after the introduction of blood doping with erythropoietin, almost no records were set in the throwing events since anabolic drugs became detectable in urine samples [2,3].…”

“…An area where records are certainly of great interest is, of course, sports. Particularly in athletics and in swimming, Olympic-or world-records are always something special and noteworthy [2,3]. But also in the context of global warming records have recently become particularly important and interesting for climatologist.…”

Records in fractal stochastic processes

“…Recently, the extreme event studies have been developed using various approaches, such as the density of states [3,4], firstpassage and return-time statistics [6][7][8], persistence [9], interoccurrence time statistics [10][11][12] and record statistics [13][14][15]. Among them, there has been considerable interest in investigating the record statistics, which has found many fruitful applications in diverse complex systems, such as spin glasses [16,17], adaptive processes [18], domain wall dynamics [19], avalanche dynamics [20], stock prices [21,22], global warming [23,24], growing network [25], high-temperature superconductors [26], the ant movements dynamics [27], flood dynamics [28], sport statistics [29,30], earthquakes [31,32], and evolutionary biology [33,34].…”