Statistics in Olympics

Summer Olympics 2008 are over now and by now I am trying to catch up with my sleep. With such a great variety of sports and superb performances from players all over the world, it was really difficult to resist watching them, even with their late night broadcasts. The scoring pattern of various sports and the performances of the athletes have always made me curious, in terms of statistics. We know that the best performaces of athletes which usally creates world records are the outliers of their performance distribution, which tends to be normal. However, I never thought anything beyod that, till I read this post on Freakonomics Blog. It refers to a graphic from The New York Times and discusses how extreme outlier was the Usian Bolt's performance in 200 m sprint.

There is this another post on iSixSigma blog basting the tie-breaking rule in Gymnastics. I was not able to completely understand this rule too, while watching the live performance and felt that it was an appropriate way of measuring a gymnast's performance. By removing the lowest score in case of a tie, Nastia actually lost a higher score than He Kexin and lost the gold medal........

"An arbitrary and statistically flawed tie-breaking rule cost Nastia Liukin of the United States the gold medal in the women’s uneven bars competition at the Olympics earlier this month, according to Dr. Prasad Raje, CEO of Instantis.

After looking at the tied scores of gymnasts Liukin and He Kexin of China, Raje figures that Liukin actually had a “statistically superior score because there was less variance in the judge’s opinions on who performed better.”"