Reality of Olympic Sprinting
Patrick Gravelle
Queen's University
Abstract
Every four years, elite athletes gather at the Summer Olympic Games, aiming to be crowned as the world's best. Audiences are spoiled with fantastic performances from competitors such as Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, and watch each event to see not only who will win a gold medal, but whether any world records will be set in the process. But how frequent are those records? This paper aims to answer that question for the track sprinting events. First we construct a cumulative distribution function to model the probability that an Olympic sprinter will be able to race within a certain range of times. After estimating parameter values for the model, we use techniques from probability theory to determine the likelihood than an elite athlete will be able to break a current world record.
