Determining the Best Track Performances of All Time Using a Conceptual Population Model for Athletics Records
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Alec G. Stephenson
and
Jonathan A. Tawn
Abstract
What is the best male and female athletics performance in history? We seek to answer this question for Olympic distance track events by simultaneously modelling race performances over all Olympic distances and all times. Our model uses techniques from a branch of statistics called extreme value theory, and incorporates information on improvements over time using an exponential trend in addition to a process which identifies the changing ability of the population of athletes across all distances. We conclude that the best male performance of all time is the 1968 world record of Lee Evans in the 400 m, and that the best female performance of all time is the current 1988 world record of Florence Griffith-Joyner in the 100 m. More generally, our approach provides a basis for deriving a ranking of track athletes over any distance and at any point over the last 100 years.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Is high-altitude mountaineering Russian roulette?
- Longitudinal analyses of Olympic athletics and swimming events find no gender gap in performance improvement
- Game importance as a dimension of uncertainty of outcome
- Determining the level of ability of football teams by dynamic ratings based on the relative discrepancies in scores between adversaries
- Spain retains its title and sets a new record – generalized linear mixed models on European football championships
- Determining the Best Track Performances of All Time Using a Conceptual Population Model for Athletics Records
- The anatomy of the bank shot in men’s basketball
- Importance of attack speed in volleyball
- Estimating player contribution in hockey with regularized logistic regression
- The anatomy of the bank shot in men’s basketball
