7-days of FREE Audio papers, translation & more with Prime
7-days of FREE Prime access
7-days of FREE Audio papers, translation & more with Prime
7-days of FREE Prime access
https://doi.org/10.1088/2632-072x/ad8854
Copy DOIJournal: Journal of Physics: Complexity | Publication Date: Oct 28, 2024 |
License type: cc-by |
Abstract Professional sport enhances social interaction among athletes through meetings such as training groups, large-scale competitions and sponsored events. Among these, the Olympic Games represent the largest international competition, having a unique global impact. This event is assumed to promote international cooperation through the values of sport, becoming an opportunity for creating global connections between athletes. Here we want to understand the properties of the following activity, an indicator of the information flows, between highly successful Olympic athletes both at microscopic and macroscopic scales. To do so, we built a database including the Twitter usernames of Olympic medallists in Tokyo 2020, using it for creating the follower-followee network, a directed network representing who followed whom in this social network. From our database of 1052 athletes, we found 7326 connections among 964 athletes. The most popular athletes, those with highest number of followers, were Kevin Durant (basketball, USA), Allyson Felix (athletics, USA), Teddy Riner (judo, France), Alex Morgan (football, USA) and Simone Biles (gymnastics, USA). The macro-scale network structure displayed organized patterns related to microscopic—node—properties such as sex, country and sport, evidencing assortative connectivity patterns. These assortative patterns highlighted the need for a model quantifying the features’ importance in the followees choice, which we introduced through a gravity approach modelling the number of connections between homogeneous groups. Our research remarks the importance of datasets built from public exposure of professional athletes, serving as a proxy to investigate interesting aspects of many complex socio-cultural systems at different scales.
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.