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Activity Number: 199
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2016 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
Abstract #320422
Title: Is There Any Racial Difference in Swimming Speed? A Nonlinear Swim Hockey-Stick Mixed-Effects Model
Author(s): Din Chen* and Jenny Ke Chen
Companies: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and East Chapel Hill High School
Keywords: Hockey-stick model ; nonlinear mixed-effect model ; 100m freestyle swim ; racial difference ; swimming speed ; transition age
Abstract:

This paper is to investigate whether or not racial differences affect swimmers' times as they age. For this purpose, swimming times for the 100-meter freestyle event were extracted from the USA Swimming Association and analyzed by a hockey-stick nonlinear mixed-effects model incorporating a transition age whereby swimming speeds start to plateau. We found that the common transition age for both Asians and Non-Asians was around 12 years old. At this age, the estimated times for the 100-meter freestyle in Asian swimmers was 65 seconds while Non-Asian swimmers will have had reached the faster 60 seconds. Before this transition age, the times for an average Asian swimmer dropped at a faster rate of 7.31 seconds per year as compared to 6.77 seconds a year for the average Non-Asian swimmer. After the transition age, the average rate of dropped time per year for Non-Asian swimmers was over twice as great at approximately 0.70 seconds than Asian swimmers at only 0.31 seconds, a considerably lower amount. Thus bearing useful information that dictates that on average, before the transition age, the rate at which Asian swimmers decrease in time is faster, but after the transition age, it is the Non-Asian swimmers who overall swim faster.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

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