100m WR predictions

[Dazed]

@rainy.here

Dazed, you’re right. Thanks for the check. My apologies to the board and the paper authors. I have no issues with what they’ve done. Rather than attack them, I should have discussed the poor reporting of what they said.

My issues with the paper are fairly minor. Without spending considerable time on it, I’m unable to understand most of the math leading up to the results.

They ignore all times before 1991, due to ‘inadequate doping’ controls. Due to forum rules, I’m not going to discus further why I think this is a mistake. It removes quite a few strong times.

They use times from 1991 to 2008, but then use this data to predict the current fastest possible 100m time. The majority of the times they’ve used are from people no longer running.
Their data analysis does not include anything pertaining to when someone’s PB was set, so the result should not be interpreted to be for the current top runners, just any particular crop of runners in general.

They don’t include Bolt’s 9.69. While his 9.72 is pretty close, and I don’t think it would change their result much if any, it seems silly to leave out the current WR, and I’d want to know what their model would predict with it included.

I agree, it does seem a bit strange that they are not using the most recent times. Mind you, they are likely to have been fairly restricted by the data set that they used. I am only guessing, as I am not familiar with extreme value analysis and first thought they may have just been using a 95% prediction interval.

I also thought that the analysis would be biased by time. Its a shame that they didn’t adjust for this as it could also correct for possible evolution in technology.