Photo: thor_matt83Usain Bolt has set another world record, this time with his Jamaican teammates in the 4 x100-meter relay. Bolt ran the anchor leg. A week earlier, Bolt false-started in the 100 final of the World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, an infraction that comes with the harshest of penalties: disqualification.
Check out our previous pieces on the statistical anomaly that is Usain Bolt by Justin Wolfers and Ian Ayres.
Usain Bolt: It’s Just Not Normal
Who’s the World’s Fastest Runner?
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People interested in large scale statistics involving professional sports might want to read Stephen Jay Gould’s essay on the demise of the .400 hitter in baseball, and the subsequent criticisms and analyses of his statistical methods and conclusions. The essay is available in a number of places including his book “Full House”. I’d be interested in whether his kind of analysis might apply to cricket as well (is it a coincidence that the Don’s achievement happened so far back in the history of modern international cricket?).
Bolt is a most gifted, exciting and personable sprinter. I am a big fan of his.
However, the difference in running surfaces, shoes, clothing (not to mention sports medicine) compared to 40-50 years ago, certainly has contributed to the lower times. That being said, Bolt is the best of his era, as everyone he competes with has the same advantages.
When Bob Hayes set world records and earned gold medals in the 1960′s, he ran in old fashioned spikes on a cinder track wearing gym shorts. If Hayes ran in today’s world, Bolt might still be best–but Hayes would push him so hard that the records might even be lower.
as usual, whenever a non-american does something well, there’s an american who would have done it SO MUCH better….
Listening to the Nightly Business Report on PBS, the idea of circulating deeper ocean water to suppress hurricanes makes me think of other unintended consequences. Hurricanes disperse energy to the high atmosphere along with the other consequences of storm damage. Turning the ocean surface would dump that heat into the ocean rather than diverting it up where some it can disperse into space. As we continue to circulate the ocean surface, the warm layer would get deeper. When we finally cannot circulate deep enough, then a much larger area of ocean becomes large enough to support hurricanes. Then the super hurricanes that really churn the ocean and die because they bring cooler water to the surface, and self-extinguish, will only grow larger. Things should get really interesting after that…
We will get Usain Bolt to run counter to the hurricane’s rotation and stop the hurrican.
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It should be noted he did not deserve the DQ according to the rules. If you go back and watch the footage, the runner to his right flinched his leg muscle, then Bolt jumped the gun. At the very least no one should have been DQ’d.
Had a look at the article “Usain Bolt:it’s just not normal.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Natural phenomena are approximately normally distributed when they can be represented roughly as a sum of fairly independent random variables. It is more plausible that the factors which go to produce Bolt’s time act more in a multiplicative fashion. it therefore could be that, the logarithms of the 200m times, suitably normalised (shifted and flipped), have closer to a normal distribution. See the literature on extreme values and the lognormal distribution.
i think usain bolt is the best sprinter on earth because of his determination and cause he is black and good looking