And it’s just as good:
The first heroes to enter the stadium, that morning, had been the leaders of the twenty-kilometre walk, an event considered hilarious by everyone on planet Earth except the athletes themselves. Somehow, wordlessly, a deal has been agreed on: we will not giggle, for politeness’s sake, and they will continue to propel themselves, year in, year out, as if learning to moonwalk too soon after a hip replacement.
The whole thing is on the New Yorker website.
New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane reports on the first week of the Beijing Olympics. The result is snidely wonderful:
“The world has given its love and trust to China, and today China will give the world a big warm hug,” one of the masters of ceremonies said. While admiring their faultless English, you had to wonder why they had chosen to learn it by watching “Barney’s Great Adventure.” How, in less than twenty years, does a place go from mowing down student dissent with tanks to offering unconditional hugs?
So, yesterday I suggested that, given improvements in training and equipment, Olympic athletes of today should be compared to those of the past using z-scores, rather than raw performance data. This was specifically with reference to comparing swimmer Michael Phelps and the historical performance of Mark Spitz, but I couldn’t find enough data from Spitz’s events in the 1972 Olympics to calculate the standardized z-scores.
(For those just joining us, z-scores use information about a distribution of data points to calculate a “universal” measure of how much one point stands out from the rest – in this case, how much Spitz or Phelps stands out from those among contemporary swimmers.)
Anyway: after another round of digging on Google, I’ve found detailed results (i.e., the final times for the top eight competitors) for the men’s 200-meter butterfly in 2008 and 1972. To convert Phelps’s and Spitz’s times to z-scores, I estimated the parameters of a distribution from the other seven men in the top eight by by taking the average (arithmetic mean) and standard deviation of those times in good ol’ Microsoft Excel [.xls file]. The z-score is just the difference between a single score and the average, divided by the standard deviation.
And …
Spitz wins! His z-score is -3.67, compared to -2.27 for Phelps. (The numbers are negative because the times are, of course, lower than the average from the other seven.) So, even though Phelps is considerably faster than Spitz, Spitz outperformed his competition by a greater margin than Phelps did.
Even without following the Olympics in any detail, it’s hard not to hear about the success of U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps: a new record for career gold medals won by an athlete in any sport, and new time records for just about every race he swims.
But what do these records mean? Over on Slate, William Saletan lists a whole bunch of advantages Phelps has over past Olympic swimmers, including the high-tech LZR swimsuits, but also things like greater pool depth. All of which makes it hard to directly compare race times achieved by swimmers in the 2008 games and those achieved by past swimmers. Including those who set the records that Phelps keeps breaking.
Saletan suggests an “Olympic inflation index” based on the year-to-year improvements in athletes’ average performance; the New York Times devotes a whole article and an animated infographic to comparing Phelps to the great American swimmer Mark Spitz. But there’s a better option, proposed years ago by none other than Stephen Jay Gould: compare not the raw performance metrics, but z-scores. A z-score is how much an individual measurement differs from the mean of a group of measurements, divided by the standard deviation of the group. Converting raw performance measurements to z-scores gives us a standardized measure of how much an athlete’s performance stands out from that of his competitors. Gould applied this to batting averages, but it’s easy to do with any set of sports scores. For instance, here’s a scholarly article that does it with basketball results [$-a].
Unfortunately, I can’t make that comparison for Phelps and Spitz. In order to calculate a z-score, you need a reasonable sample size – say, at least five (and that’s if you make some assumptions about the way those scores are distributed). While the New York Times website lists the times for the top eight men in (e.g.) the 200m butterfly at Beijing 2008, I haven’t been able to dig up comparable data for Mark Spitz’s victory in the same event at Munich 1972 – or for any other event, either. Kind of a downer, I know – but I’m going to keep digging around for the data. If anyone has a lead, feel free to comment.
Edit: I found the data! Results in a new post.
Reference
Chatterjee, S, Yilmaz, MR (1999). The NBA as an Evolving Multivariate System. The American Statistician, 53, 257-262
