The growing problem of comparing elite sport performances: The Olympic speed skating case

Abstract

The increased performance densities in the top of elite sports, sometimes mutual contest results are within the error margins of the measuring sys-tems, has caused major problems in comparing performances and deciding on winners. In case of Dutch speed skating, the pool of highly competitive athletes is large, and, since there is a limit on the number of Olympic participators per country, the Olympic selection procedure is obviously a precarious affair. Because more than 100 years of data is available, we are able to study in this respect the well-known Gould hypothesis: When the sport matures, the variation in performance, especially at the top, decreases, and extreme events, where one athlete outperforms all his competitors, be-come rarer. Since Gould's hypothesis only holds with 'unchanged rules of the game', several data corrections, for example on the introduction of the klap skate, are needed. A major goal of this paper is to analyze the possible role of Gould's hypothesis concerning the growing performance densities for top speed skating.

The Dutch Approach in Selecting Olympic Speed Skaters

“…For any distance race, the AV-5 value of a skater is the difference between their actual finish time and the average of the first five finishing times of that distance. (The reason for taking AV-5 values instead of, for example, AV-4 or AV-6 values was rather arbitrary, although scenario analysis with AV-5 showed the most stable outcome; see [4] and [5].) This normalization of race times corrects for circumstantial 500 (3), 1,000 (3), 1,500 (3), 5,000 (3) and 10,000 (2) meters for men.…”