Combining a couple of parallel threads here... --- Kurt Bray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't think it exactly kills the sport, but it certainly detracts from > it. It detracts from the sport to have pretty much every World Record > followed by a "but,...." or a "however,...." as in say "Tim Montgomery > set a new world record of 9.78 seconds however, thanks to the presence > of favorable tailwind and a suspiciously fast reaction time, track > experts rate this performance as actually no better than the 15th best."
I would agree with that. I would also add to it with rhetorical question. If people are so concerned with Montgomery's near-illegal reaction time of 0.104, why has no one objected to Bridgette Foster's 0.101 in the 100h? Could it be because she not only failed to break the WR, but also came in 2nd in the race? In other words, what Kurt is saying and what this example illustrates is that the more notable the performance, the more we try to pick it apart and discredit the accomplishment. In that light, the attitude being discussed certainly contributes to the "killing" of the sport. --- "Jones, Carleton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > However, because they can be calculated, > they are still interesting to factor out. I don't disagree with that. Where I have a problem is when an attempt is made to claim that those components can be factored out and leave us with something more meaningful than the base performance. As I see it, wind and altitude conversions can give us an *idea* how much an individual may have varied within a given race, but they cannot tell us with any certainy what performance level to predict from a given individual on any given day. That, to me, is mental gymnastics. > <<Ok, so how do you account for an athlete maintaining a longer drive > phase or digging harder to fight a headwind vs. someone who does not > change his or her race pattern?>> > > You don't, of course. So? The wind still affects the race, we can > account for it, so why not do so? Well, it depends what the objective of doing so is. If we simply want to see what might have been, then no problem. If we want to diminish the importance of a performance on the basis of very incomplete statistical conversions, that that is a huge problem. > I think this is a common distance runner thing - we ascribe great > significance to effort, because in distance running it makes a big > difference. I don't think it makes nearly as much difference in > sprinting Actually, I spent the past 4 years coaching sprinters and consider myself much more sprint-minded than distance... :-) > I think sprinters usually get max performance out of their effort. > As such, I think there is much less variability in sprint performances > due to factors like 'effort', as opposed to wind, altitude, etc. I would have to disagree here. From my observations (highly unscientific, admittedly), sprinters are, on average, actually much less able to overcome effort related factors such as energy level, sleep, rest, muscle tension, etc. If you look at just the raw numbers, it may look minimal, but looking at percentages can show huge variance. > It's not that scientists ignore it, they just lump it with 'randomness'. > One always accounts for all of the variability one can, but there is > always randomness. As we learn more, we are able to seperate out and > account for more and more of the variation from that pool of randomness. Is any attempt being made to account for factors other than wind and altitude? It seems to me that all the statistical analysis is simply ignoring it as not possible to calculate and making the assumption that what we do know is good enough. Dan ===== http://AccountBiller.com - MyCalendar, D-Man, ReSearch, etc. http://Run-Down.com - 10,000 Running Links, Fantasy T&F ------------------------------------------------------------ @ o Dan Kaplan - [EMAIL PROTECTED] <|\/ <^- ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) _/ \ \/\ (503)370-9969 phone/fax / / __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com
