←Back

199 – Contributed Poster Presentations: Section on Statistics in Sports

Is There a Racial Difference in Swimming Speed? A Non-Linear Swim Hockey-Stick Mixed-Effects Model

at East Chapel Hill High School

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.