An athlete’s performance typically follows a parabolic trajectory, reaching a peak value at some point in his career and then tending to fall back.
The Olympic Games are starting. For athletes, it is the event of a lifetime. You have to be at your best, but hours of training are not everything. “Throughout an athlete’s career, performance typically follows a parabolic trajectory, reaching a maximum value at one point in their career and trending in the opposite direction for the remainder of their career. This is called a “peak” or the interval of time during which an athlete achieves the best performances of their life. The length of this interval, commonly called “apogee,” illustrates the duration of the peak. In the world of competitive sport, an athlete’s peak is limited almost exclusively by their age.” explain David Awosoga and Matthew Chow, students at the University of Waterloo (Canada), whose analysis was published in the Royal Statistical Society’s Significance Journal.
An athlete’s success is therefore not only limited by his level of technical maturity but also by the age at which he reaches the level of expertise necessary to compete with the world’s best athletes. Athletics encompasses the disciplines of running, jumping, throwing and combined events. “Unlike other Olympic sports such as football and tennis, which hold their own high-level competitions outside the Games, the Olympics are the biggest stage on which track and field athletes compete.” David Awosoga emphasizes.
For their study, the two students collected a dataset of year-by-year career performances of every track and field athlete who competed in an individual event at the last seven Olympic Games – from Atlanta 1996 to Tokyo 2020. According to their observations, the peak performance of an Olympic track and field athlete is at age 27. “This average age is surprisingly similar between men and women” note the authors. After the age of 27, there is only a 44% probability that an athlete will still be able to reach his peak, and this figure decreases with each subsequent year.
“We find that a track and field athlete’s peak typically spans a single Olympic Games. By studying these physiological and external factors, we better understand the uphill battle athletes face as they prepare for what will most likely be their only chance at Olympic glory.” they conclude.