When closely matched athletes are competing in events that involve running, swimming, throwing or lifting, why does one of them win one day and another the next? Surely whoever is the fastest or strongest will remain so, for a while at least. Often the original winner will return a few days later and win again, so why did he or she lose the race between the two victories?
鈥� The questioner must not belong to a gym. If you regularly take exercise in a quantifiable way, you soon notice that there are 鈥渟trong鈥� days and 鈥渨eak鈥� days. The most obvious factors influencing these are the amount and quality of sleep achieved beforehand, and how one is nourished. Elite athletes may eliminate variation in their food intake on race days, and may even manage to regularise their sleep schedules, but one or another may be fighting off a minor viral infection, or the temperature or humidity may be more to one鈥檚 liking than to another鈥檚.
鈥淓lite athletes may eliminate variation from their diets and regularise their sleep schedules鈥�
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Steve Gisselbrecht, Boston, Massachusetts, US
鈥� The answer to this question lies in another question within the query: how closely matched are the athletes?
If the athletes were identical in skill, strength, speed and motivation, presumably they would never beat one another. But they do, because there are always factors both innate and environmental that interfere.
Nowadays most athletic events involving covering a distance are timed to one-thousandth of a second, so any competitor who beats another by less than this margin is declared to have equalled the other鈥檚 time. That is extremely unlikely, so in fact there is almost always a winner and a loser.
At a more macro level, the environment, plus the athletes鈥� mental and physical states are likely to vary by more than, say, 0.1 per cent and this makes all the difference at the elite level. When you add in diet, will to win, fit of shoes, distance from starting gun and such like, it鈥檚 surprising there are any dead heats at all.
Mike Rennie, Professor of clinical physiology, University of Nottingham Medical School, Derby, UK
鈥� An athlete鈥檚 form reflects many different and constantly varying factors, any of which could prevent a win if overdone, underdone, or in the wrong combination.
Whether psychological or physiological, any changes in the body鈥檚 status will take time to resolve, causing cyclical or quasi-cyclical performance as they do. Effective coaches try to time the optimum for the day of performance and the optima may be brief, sometimes ended by the reaction to victory itself 鈥� for example, through overconfidence or a lapse in commitment.
Athletes don鈥檛 perform according to fixed standards of precision like machine tools. The , or normal distribution, is ubiquitous. It describes the statistical variability of any athlete鈥檚 performance and of differences between athletes. Each component variable has its own normal curve, and how they combine affects the athlete鈥檚 overall variability. Different athletes鈥� curves of variation can overlap far enough to reverse the outcomes of competitions dramatically.
鈥淎thletes do not perform according to fixed standards of precision like machine tools鈥�
Some variation in form is unpredictable, such as injury, illness, personal events, psyching or luck on the day. Other effects are systematic, such as maturing, declining or cumulative stress, whether mental or physical. Any of those could cause gradual eclipse; almost any could cause sudden loss of form, even mid-game, and most setbacks are at least temporarily reversible.
Jon Richfield, Somerset West, South Africa