Olympic Swimming - Changes in the 100m Women’s Event

Boxplots
Confidence Intervals
Difference in Means
Summary Statistics
Describing 100m event times for Women Olympic Swimmers from 1924 to 2020
Authors
Affiliation

Brendan Karadenes

St. Lawrence University

Robin Lock

St. Lawrence University

Ivan Ramler

St. Lawrence University

Published

June 14, 2024

Introduction

For this activity, you will be exploring the event times for female swimmers that competed in the 100m event from 1968 to 2020 in the Olympics.

In particular, you will examine visualizations and conduct confidence intervals to explore the changes in finish times between different types of strokes and earlier vs. recent years.

Investigating this data is useful for several reasons. Exploring this data can deepen our understanding of how swimming techniques and training have improved over the years and which strokes will be the fastest in this event. Also, analyzing how times have improved over the years gives insights into how competitive the event has gotten in recent years. It can show the subtle time differentials between the top and average athletes. Analysis like this can help inform the impact of modern training strategies, inspire athletes to practice different strokes, and help aspiring Olympic swimmers understand what times they need to be competitive.

This activity would be suitable for an in-class example or quiz.

By the end of the activity, you will be able to:

  1. Analyze distributions using boxplots.
  2. Compare and contrast distributions in the same or different groups.
  3. Assess differences between two samples using confidence intervals.

For this activity, students will primarily use basic concepts of boxplots and confidence intervals to analyze data.

The provided worksheets require StatKey or similar software to get the z-score. They will also require access to a calculator.

Since the data are provided, instructors are encouraged to modify the worksheets to have student’s to make calculations and models on their preferred software.

Data

The data set contains 194 rows and 10 columns. Each row represents a female swimmer who competed in the 100m Olympic event during the period 1968 to 2020. The data includes top 8 finishers from woman racers however, due to lack of records, some of the data is missing.

Download data: olympic_swimming_women.csv

Variable Descriptions
Variable Description
Location hosting city of the Olympics that the swimmer competed in
Year year that the swimmer competed
dist_m distance in meters of the race
Stroke Backstroke, Butterfly, or Freestyle
Gender gender of swimmer (Female only - see below)
Team 3 letter country code the swimmer is affiliated with
Athlete first and last name of the swimmer
Results time, in seconds, that the swimmer completed the race
Rank place of the swimmer in the event out of four
time_period time period that olympian swam in, either “early” (1924-1972) or “recent” (1976-2020)

Data Source

Kaggle Olympic Swimming 1912 to 2020

A larger version of this data is available on the SCORE Data Repository: olympic_swimming

The data set contains 606 rows and 10 columns. Each row represents a swimmer who competed in the 100m Olympic event during the period 1924 to 2020. The data includes top 8 finishers from men and woman racers however, due to lack of records, some of the data is excluded.

Materials

We provide an editable Microsoft Word handout along with its solutions.

The handouts should only require a calculator and can be modified to fit the instructors needs.

Class handout

Class handout - with solutions

In conclusion, the Olympic swimming module provides valuable opportunities for students in several important areas. It allows them to understand how to interpret visuals and confidence intervals to conclude statistical significance. The calculation of confidence intervals enables student’s to understand the remarkable progress that’s been made in swimming training. In general, this worksheet allows students to critically analyze Olympic swimming results from 1968 to 2020 and draw important conclusions regarding the different styles of swimming over the years.