Loffing Florian, Schorer Jörg
Research Group "Sport and Movement Science", Institute of Sport Science, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
Front Sports Act Living. 2021 Mar 31;3:662203. doi: 10.3389/fspor.2021.662203. eCollection 2021.
Relative age effects (RAE) describe the unintended side effect of annual age grouping such that athletes born close to a specific cutoff date are more likely to be associated with attaining higher performance status than athletes born later. One factor suggested to override the RAE is handedness. Given the left-handers' rarity and their proposed performance advantage in interactive sports, left-handedness may be associated with a lower likelihood of suffering from selection inequalities like RAE in those sports compared with right-handedness. Here, in a two-study approach, we tested that hypothesis by examining male and female athletes from various interactive individual sports sampled over a 10-year period from 2007 to 2016. Study 1 investigated distributions of birth and handedness of senior athletes listed in the top 200 of year-end world rankings in table tennis, tennis, squash, and fencing (épée, foil, and saber). Study 2 followed a similar design but focused on junior athletes in the fencing disciplines and tennis. Unlike the above prediction, in both studies, birth distribution was not found to be reliably associated with handedness in any of the sports or disciplines considered. Left-handers were consistently overrepresented in épée, foil, and table tennis, occasionally in saber and tennis, and not at all in squash. Birth frequencies decreased from quartile Q1 (January to March) to Q4 in almost any sporting domain at the junior level, whereas such trend was rarely found at the senior level. In conclusion, while providing novel insight on the role handedness may play at the junior level, our findings do not support the hypothesis that left-handedness helps override birth-related inequalities in high sporting achievement in elite interactive individual sports.
相对年龄效应（RAE）描述了年度年龄分组产生的意外副作用，即出生时间接近特定截止日期的运动员比晚出生的运动员更有可能取得更高的成绩。一个被认为可以克服相对年龄效应的因素是利手。鉴于左利手的稀缺性以及他们在互动性运动中所具有的表现优势，与右利手相比，左利手在这些运动中遭受相对年龄效应等选拔不平等现象的可能性可能更低。在此，我们采用两项研究的方法，通过对2007年至2016年这10年间从各类互动性个人运动项目中抽取的男女运动员进行研究来验证这一假设。研究1调查了乒乓球、网球、壁球和击剑（重剑、花剑和佩剑）年终世界排名前200的成年运动员的出生分布和利手情况。研究2采用了类似的设计，但重点关注击剑项目和网球项目中的青少年运动员。与上述预测不同的是，在两项研究中，在所考虑的任何一项运动或项目中，均未发现出生分布与利手之间存在可靠的关联。在重剑、花剑和乒乓球项目中，左利手的比例一直偏高，佩剑和网球项目中偶尔偏高，而壁球项目中则完全没有这种情况。在青少年组的几乎所有运动领域，出生频率从第一季度（1月至3月）到第四季度都呈下降趋势，而在成年组中这种趋势很少出现。总之，虽然我们的研究结果为利手在青少年组中可能发挥的作用提供了新的见解，但并不支持左利手有助于克服精英互动性个人运动中与出生相关的高体育成就不平等这一假设。
