Departament d'Enginyeria Quimica, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e40335. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040335. Epub 2012 Jul 12.
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, and thus provide an optimal source of information for studying the evolution of sport achievements and predicting the limits that athletes can reach. Unfortunately, the models introduced so far for the description of athlete performances at the Olympics are either sophisticated or unrealistic, and more importantly, do not provide a unified theory for sport performances. Here, we address this issue by showing that relative performance improvements of medal winners at the Olympics are normally distributed, implying that the evolution of performance values can be described in good approximation as an exponential approach to an a priori unknown limiting performance value. This law holds for all specialties in athletics-including running, jumping, and throwing-and swimming. We present a self-consistent method, based on normality hypothesis testing, able to predict limiting performance values in all specialties. We further quantify the most likely years in which athletes will breach challenging performance walls in running, jumping, throwing, and swimming events, as well as the probability that new world records will be established at the next edition of the Olympic Games.
受古希腊运动会的启发，现代奥运会代表了世界上最大的体育技能和竞技精神的盛会。自 1896 年以来，奥运会运动员的表现反映了人类在体育运动中的潜力，因此为研究运动成绩的演变和预测运动员所能达到的极限提供了最佳信息来源。不幸的是，迄今为止为描述奥运会运动员的表现而引入的模型要么过于复杂，要么不切实际，更重要的是，它们没有为运动表现提供统一的理论。在这里，我们通过证明奥运会奖牌获得者的相对表现提高通常呈正态分布来解决这个问题，这意味着表现值的演变可以很好地近似为对预先未知的极限表现值的指数逼近。这一规律适用于包括跑步、跳跃和投掷在内的所有田径运动项目以及游泳。我们提出了一种基于正态性假设检验的自洽方法，能够预测所有项目的极限表现值。我们进一步量化了运动员在跑步、跳跃、投掷和游泳项目中突破具有挑战性的表现墙的最可能年份，以及在奥运会的下一届比赛中创造新的世界纪录的概率。
