ArticlePloS one2010
Athlete atypicity on the edge of human achievement: performances stagnate after the last peak, in 1988.
Article in PloS one, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 69 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Performance Increases in Pair Skating and Ice Dance at International Championships and Olympic Games.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
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- Population Muscle Strength Predicts Olympic Medal Tallies: Evidence from 20 Countries in the PURE Prospective Cohort Study.PloS one · 2017Article
- Are We Reaching the Limits ofFrontiers in physiology · 2017Review
- Has Athletic Performance Reached its Peak?Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2015Review
- Prevalence of doping use in elite sports: a review of numbers and methods.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2015Review
- Elite triathletes in 'Ironman Hawaii' get older but faster.Age (Dordrecht, Netherlands) · 2014Article
- Change of the age and performance of swimmers across World Championships and Olympic Games finals from 1992 to 2013 - a cross-sectional data analysis.SpringerPlus · 2014Article
- Speed trends in male distance running.PloS one · 2014Article
- Exponential growth combined with exponential decline explains lifetime performance evolution in individual and human species.Age (Dordrecht, Netherlands) · 2012Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The growth law for the development of top athletes performances remains unknown in quantifiable sport events. Here we present a growth model for 41351 best performers from 70 track and field (T&F) and swimming events and detail their characteristics over the modern Olympic era. We show that 64% of T&F events no longer improved since 1993, while 47% of swimming events stagnated after 1990, prior to a second progression step starting in 2000. Since then, 100% of swimming events continued to progress.We also provide a measurement of the atypicity for the 3919 best performances (BP) of each year in every event. The secular evolution of this parameter for T&F reveals four peaks; the most recent (1988) followed by a major stagnation. This last peak may correspond to the most recent successful attempt to push forward human physiological limits. No atypicity trend is detected in swimming. The upcoming rarefaction of new records in sport may be delayed by technological innovations, themselves depending upon economical constraints.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.