Archive for Gebrselassie

Faster till when?

Posted in Running, Statistics with tags , , on December 28, 2008 by xi'an

In the December issue of Significance, there is an interesting article by Joseph Hilbe (who also wrote a nice review on our book Bayesian Core in the Journal of Statistical Software) on the prediction of the ultimate time in athletics. (There are plenty of interesting articles in this issue, actually! In a few years, this general audience Statistics journal from the RSS truly turned into an excellent magazine.) The questions are whether or not there is a lower bound, called the ultimate performance time, to the performance times in athletic events like the 100m or the marathon, and if yes, what is the predicted value for this ultimate performance time. Hilbe’s paper is actually a criticism of a single paper by Kruper and Sterken published this year in Statistical Thinking in Sports. The shortcomings of Kruper and Sterken’s model are clearly exposed, the most glaring one being that the ultimate performance time for women 5000m has been beaten this year by four seconds… For instance, the predicted ultimate time for the men marathon is 2:00:56, in relation to the current world record of 2:03:59 by Gebrselassie. There is no reason to believe that younger men like Nicolas Menza who won the Boulogne-Billancourt half-marathon this year in 1:00:12 cannot improve this record if training earlier for marathons. So the model of Kruper and Sterken is limited and more factors should be taken into account like training facilities and techniques, morphological improvements, alimentation and medical advances, not to mention drugs or genetic manipulations… But I do not understand the perspective taken by the paper that does not go further into Statistics than factual descriptive statistics and that concludes that “experience in the sport and a basic knowledge of human physiology and biomechanics are better (to make) predictions than mathematical analysis“. Hardly fitting for enhancing the profession for the general public and for a journal whose motto is Statistics making sense!!!

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