A Mathematical View of Track and Field World Records

A Mathematical View of Track and Field World Records | Inside Science: "A mathematician has developed a new model that can estimate which track and field world records are the most likely to be broken.

Brian Godsey, a graduate student in mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, recently published a paper including computations of the likelihood of record-setting performances in 48 different men's and women's track and field events during this calendar year.

Godsey's paper did not directly address the likelihood of an athlete setting a track and field world record at the 2012 London Olympics, but his analysis suggests that viewers should keep a close watch on the men's 110-meter hurdles and three women's events, the 5,000-meter and 3000-meter steeplechase races, as wells as the  hammer throw. There is a 95 percent chance that the women's steeplechase record will be broken this year, Godsey wrote in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.

Godsey gives competitors a better-than-10 percent chance of besting the world record in 22 events during this calendar year, 18 of which will be contested at the Olympics. Numerous records, however, seem far out of reach.

This year, no woman has come within 5 seconds of the 3:50.46 record for the 1500-meter run, set in 1993 by Qu Yunxia of China. Godsey predicted a less than one one-hundredth of a percent chance of the record falling in 2012. Most of the event's top historical times are from the 1980s and 1990s. That's also true for numerous other events. Performances from the 1980s currently hold the record in 13 of the events Godsey reviewed."