Olympic Medals Research Articles

Identification of high-probability medal-winning events for Malaysian swimmers through analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

Introduction: The achievement of an Olympic gold medal in 2016 by a Southeast Asian (SEA) swimmer invigorated Malaysian swim authorities to increase investment in the sport. However, Malaysian swimming performance declined during the 2019 SEA Games, intensifying the urgency to identify events that have the highest potential for Malaysian swimmers to achieve a podium finish by comparing international swimming records of previous SEA (SG), Asian (AG) and Commonwealth (CG) games, and also world records with those recorded during the 2021 Malaysia Open which involved swimmers from the Malaysian national team.Methods: Primary data from the Malaysia Open were converted into swim points according to FINA's formula and compared with SG, AG, CG and world records dated up to 25 August 2021 (including records set during the Tokyo Olympics) using a spreadsheet programme.Results: Analyses (n = 80 male and 79 female records) revealed that: (i) Malaysian male swimmers were strongest in the middle-distance freestyle and backstroke events, while female swimmers were best in the short- and middle-distance breaststroke events; (ii) overall Malaysian swimmers' swim points were 30 years behind current world standards; (iii) current male and female national team swimmers have a possibility of undergoing successful participation experience in 30% and 60% of international-level events, respectively and (iv) swimmers from Singapore and Vietnam won most of the medals offered at SG, while China, Japan and South Korea are the main winners at AG.Conclusion: Malaysian swim authorities should focus on developing swimmers for endurance events and events that do not require an endowment of significant physical size, and on training female swim talent to win at international-level swim competitions. In addition, new training technology needs to be incorporated as this has been found to be indispensable.

Saving the Life of a National Sport Organization With Strategy and Governance

Endurance Canada is facing a dire situation. It must turn itself around or face bankruptcy. The problems are piling up for Endurance Canada’s Board of Directors. Over the last 20 years, the Board’s Chair, Bill Fitzpatrick, has seen his sport’s athletes go from winning Olympic medals to not having any medals internationally. Within Endurance Canada, he has seen high staff turnover and burnout, power struggles between the national and provincial/territorial levels, and their revenues have been hit hard. COVID-19 was the proverbial nail in the coffin. Something drastic needs to happen. So, Bill brings in Amanda Tsang, a strategy expert. She has 1 month to come up with a plan to bring Endurance Canada back to life. The case follows Amanda as she reviews the strategy, structure, and governance issues in the organization. This fictional case asks students to (a) develop a strategic plan for Endurance Canada, (b) show how structure and strategy are interrelated, and (c) reflect on governance issues in a multilevel governance system.

Factors in the development of athletics and the achievements of Olympic sports in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast of the USSR

Olympic Sport is an important part of physical culture and sports movement at the international, national and regional levels. The achievements of athletes at the Olympic Games are the hallmark of the country and are of great importance for the formation of its image in the international arena. Track-and-field athletics is a leader in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in the number of athletes participating in the Olympic Games and in the number of Olympic medals won during the Olympic games from 1952 to 1988. The article studies the historical aspects of the development of this sport, which is of significant interest not only for the historiography of the physical culture and sports movement in Ukraine and the region, but also allows us to highlight the main factors that determine the effectiveness of training highly qualified athletes. The chronological scope of this study covers the period from 1922 to 1991, when Ukraine was the part of the USSR and the Olympic sports developed in the conditions of the tough competition among athletes from 15 union republics. During this period, the Russian Federation had an advantage in the development of Olympic sports, training experience of athletes from Ukraine and other Union Republics was of particular importance. According to this, preparation of Ukrainian and other Union Republic athletes is of great interest.

English

Objective: To evaluate the morphological changes of Cuban super heavyweight boxers, more and less successful, through the period 1976-2014. Material and method: Thirty super heavy boxers, who were members of the Cuban national teams in the period 1976-2014, were compared; The strategy consisted of separating the group in the periods 1976-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009 and 2010-2014. Sixteen anthropometric dimensions were recorded (weight, height, sitting height, six skinfold thickness, five girths and two breadths), from which the body composition and the somatotype were obtained. The data were analyzed applying the Analysis of variance (ANOVA). The conglomerate analysis based on the Euclidean distance was used in order to evaluate the correspondence between physical development and sports performance. A discriminant analysis was carried out in order to analyze the contribution of the anthropometrical variables to the variance of different clusters. Results: Most of the anthropometric dimensions and indicators showed significant differences, having an impact on the increase in adiposity, body fat and endomorphy (p <0.05), as well as the decrease in the indicators dependent on height (p <0.05). The analysis by conglomerates, as well as the study of the Migratory Distances of the somatotype, showed that the Olympic medalist boxers differed in terms of the characteristics of body composition and in terms of the intensity of the somatotype changes in the period 1976-2014. Conclusions: The Cuban boxer of the super heavyweight category showed a wide range of morphological demands, but these were framed within the international trends of professional boxers. The morphological attributes of the Olympic medalists differed from each other, and from the rest of the boxers investigated over time. These results provide anthropometric data of high scientific value, both for selection and for medical control of training.

Forecasting the Olympic medal distribution – A socioeconomic machine learning model

Forecasting the number of Olympic medals for each nation is highly relevant for different stakeholders: Ex ante, sports betting companies can determine the odds while sponsors and media companies can allocate their resources to promising teams. Ex post, sports politicians and managers can benchmark the performance of their teams and evaluate the drivers of success. We apply machine learning, more specifically a two-staged Random Forest, to a dataset containing socioeconomic variables of 206 countries (1991–2020). For the first time, we outperform the more traditional naïve forecast for four consecutive Olympics between 2008 and 2020.

The Expected Number of Olympic Medals: A Case Study of Team Portugal at Tokyo 2020

The 2020 Summer Olympic Games reached to an end in Tokyo, Japan. Even though all the hiccups, constraints, and challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Games were successfully held in August 2021. For the first time in history, Team Portugal won four medals (one gold, one silver, and two bronzes). In 2018 the Portuguese Olympic Committee signed a contract with the Portuguese Institute of Sport and Youth (i.e., Portuguese government) listing the deliverables of the mission Tokyo 2020 against a funding scheme of 18.5 million euros (Contrato n.o 33-A/2018; Contrato -Programa de Desenvolvimento Desportivo n.o CP/1/DDF/2018). The document sets, among other goals and deliverables, that no less than two medals would be won at Tokyo 2020 (section IV.1. of the contract). On the road to Tokyo, Portugal got more than two medallists at World Championships in several Olympic sports. Indeed, there were six to eight potential medallists at the 2020 Olympic Games (O Jogo, 2021). There is evidence that just one-third to one-fourth of the Olympic athletes are able to excel and outperform at the Olympic Games. In the sport of competitive swimming, just 29.82% of all male Olympians and 53.84% of the finalists at Rio 2016 improved their entry times (Barbosa, 2016a). On average, only 30% of the swimmers were able to improve their entry time at the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games (Barbosa, 2016b). At Rio 2016, Team Portugal was expected to win two medals out of nine potential medallists, i.e., almost 25% of effectiveness (Garcia, 2016). Thus, one can wonder if the Portuguese Olympic Committee was sensible, assuming that two athletes would reach the podium spot out of six to eight potential medallists. Also, it begs the question if the four medals won were an outstanding achievement, deemed as a substantial improvement of the Portuguese sports system or, if alternatively, the Portuguese Olympic Committee underestimated the number of medals that the country could win.

Iwo Amelung (ed.), Discourses of Weakness in Modern China: Historical Diagnoses of the ‘Sick Man of East Asia’

Although China was one of the strongest performers at 2020’s Tokyo Olympics, media coverage of the ‘medal race’ noted that, for most of the first century of Olympic competition, the world’s most populous nation had been a minor or even insignificant presence on the biggest sporting stage—not winning its first Olympic gold medal until 1984. Twenty years after this first gold, during the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the website of the Beijing’s Olympic Games organizing committee published an article titled ‘From ‘Sick Man of East Asia’ to ‘Sports Big Power’, which included a cartoon allegedly published in what was described as a ‘foreign’ newspaper (but which was published in a Chinese-language newspaper from Singapore). The article notes that the cartoon featured ‘a group of thin and emaciated people. wearing mandarin robes and jackets, carry a huge duck egg—zero’, and explains, ‘the title of this cartoon is “Sick Man of East Asia.” This is humiliation and satire of the Chinese athletes but also indicates that the disaster-ridden old China has no status in the world’.1

Olympic coaching excellence: A quantitative study of Olympic swimmers’ perceptions of their coaches

ABSTRACT Although coaching is a co-created process, researchers investigating the psychological aspects of Olympic coaching have tended to overlook the perceptions of athletes and whether these distinguish between performance-related outcomes. The objective of this research was to examine whether athletes’ perceptions of their coaches discriminate between world-leading (i.e., Olympic gold medal winning) and world-class (i.e., Olympic non-gold medal winning) coaches. Observer-reported psychometric questionnaires were completed by 38 Olympic swimmers who had collectively won 59 Olympic medals, of which 31 were gold. The questionnaires assessed perceptions of 12 variables within the Big Five personality traits, the dark triad, and emotional intelligence, and the data was analyzed using three one-way multivariate analysis of variance and follow-up univariate F-tests. The results showed that world-leading coaches were perceived to be significantly higher on conscientiousness, openness to experience, perception of emotion, and management of others emotion, and lower on narcissism, than world-class coaches. This suggests that athletes’ perceptions of their coaches may discriminate between world-leading and world-class coaches. The implications for coaches’ psychological development are discussed and compared with previously reported Olympic coaches’ perceptions of themselves.

‘Coach, or female coach? And does it matter?’: An autoethnography of playing the gendered game over a twenty-year elite swim coaching career

ABSTRACT Women are under-represented in high-performance head coach positions throughout global sport. To shed light on why this under-representation exists within UK swimming, an autoethnographic account of the first author’s experiences as a woman who competed and coached in high-performance swimming over a thirty-year career is presented. Critical reflexive conversations with the second author, coupled with sourcing artefacts such as memories, photographs and emails inspired four evocative personal stories that chart the voyage of: 1) a child entering and aspiring in the sport, 2) the transition from a retired female athlete to novice coach; 3) progression in becoming an international coach, and; 4) reaching the pinnacle of a coaching career and then beginning a coach tutor role. Accounts of how gender as a relation of power was exercised and navigated during the inauguration and progression as a woman who coached in a patriarchal profession are offered. In the pursuit of winning Olympic medals, an unrecognised double bind was revealed to have been negotiated throughout the entirety of the coach development pathway whereby masculine ideals were uncritically reproduced within the cultural landscape of elite UK swimming. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, field and doxa offer analytical insight for how masculine norms were socially reproduced. This double bind is argued as having and continuing to impede women coaches’ progression towards achieving equality within high-performance settings like UK swimming. The study highlights the value of acknowledging socio-cultural factors in coach education to address gender imbalances at an elite level.

Physical Training Information System of College Sports Based on Big Data Mobile Terminal

The development of information technology is changing all walks of life. People’s health problem is more and more prominent; people begin to talk about the reform of college sports training. Sports no longer rely on individual games, but on the comprehensive strength of science and technology competition. The fierce competition for Olympic gold medal in modern competitive sports is largely due to the competition of scientific and technological strength of various countries. China has also conducted a lot of research on sports information and made some achievements. Through the investigation, we know that, at present, the provincial level sports teams have established the relevant sports training information management system, which is very effective. The latest scientific and technological achievements are combined with sports to establish the university sports information system. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the university sports physical training information system based on big data mobile terminal, study the big data embedded system, improve the effect of sports skills training, and meet the social demand for high skilled sports talents. This paper uses the literature method, experimental investigation method, and big data spectral clustering algorithm-related experiments to study the advantages of big data and uses the value of big data and embedded system model to study the university sports physical fitness training information system based on big data mobile terminal. The results show that 40.6% of college students spend more time in physical exercise, based on the application of big data embedded system in college sports training; it is of great significance to arrange sports training methods to improve students’ sports training performance.

Olympic Medals : Matter of Nerves

Using data of over 120 years of Olympic history, I find that the mean age of medal winners is higher than that of non-medal winners. This relationship is more pronounced in the case of Gold medalists. I hypothesize that Age is a proxy for the experience of the Olympic Games and use show that the probability of getting a medal in the second appearance is higher than that in the first one. This could be due to experience, better handling of pressure, and better preparation. Our results are robust to change in models, controls, proxies, and years.

The Olympic Oath and so Much More: A Biographical Interpretive Analysis of the Life of Victor Boin, 1886–1974

Victor Boin (1886–1974) was one of Belgium’s most multi-talented athletes of the first quarter of the twentieth century, as evidenced by his achievements as an Olympic medallist in both water polo and fencing, and as a former vice-world champion, European champion, and Belgian champion in respectively swimming, ice skating, and jiujitsu. On a global level, Boin is well known for being the first modern athlete who swore the Olympic oath on behalf of all competing athletes during the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp. However, less international scholarly attention has been paid to Boin’s important role concerning the development, promotion, and professionalization of sports and physical education in Belgium and beyond. Drawing on a biographical interpretive analysis, this study enhances understanding about Boin’s multifaceted career as an athlete, (sports) journalist, and sports manager. Both primary (for example, archival documents, visual representations, and audio-visual materials) and secondary sources are examined to contextualize Boin’s life in light of relevant historical events and evolutions in both Belgian and international Olympic sports.

An Analysis of China’s International Competitiveness in Competitive Sports Industry by Means of Mathematical Modeling

China has joined the world’s front rank of competitive sports, with remarkable performance in the Summer Olympic Games in particular. But there is no denying that other events and non-Olympic events have been neglected when emphasis has been put on the Olympic Gold Medal Winning Program. This paper makes a statistical analysis of China’s international competitiveness in competitive sports industry by means of mathematical statistics, so as to analyze the deficiencies in China’s development in competitive sports industry on the basis of statistical results. This study suggests that although China’s international competitiveness in competitive sports is improving rapidly, the gap with the USA remains wide; secondly, China’s development in competitive sports is seriously uneven, which is mainly reflected in the development of summer and winter sports; but in the current situation, there are very favorable opportunities for China’s development in competitive sports, namely, opportunities in the policy environment, opportunities in the climate for hosting events and opportunities in the transition of household consumption.

Case Studies of Olympic Medalist Coach–Athlete Relationships: A Retrospective Analysis Prior to and During the Olympics

The Olympics is a unique and challenging performance setting that tests the strength of the coach–athlete relationship. The purpose of this study was to investigate the coach–athlete relationship prior to and during the Olympics with Olympic-medal-winning athletes and their coaches. Qualitative research methods were implemented where three Olympic medalist coach–athlete dyads participated in semistructured interviews. Data collection included three separate interviews (athlete, coach, and coach–athlete) for each dyad. Cross-case analysis identified three lower order themes related to creating an athlete-centered environment: (a) empowering effective decision making, (b) open and honest communication, and (c) mental cue-based instruction and feedback. In addition, three lower order themes related to developing a caring supportive relationship emerged: (a) developed trust, (b) commitment, and (c) gratitude. Results indicated that coaches and athletes perceived that their success at the Olympics Games was influenced by the strength of the coach–athlete relationship that was developed over multiple years prior to the Olympics.

Performance benchmarking of achievements in the Olympics: An application of Data Envelopment Analysis with restricted multipliers

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a useful tool for measuring the relative efficiencies of participating nations in the Olympic Games. DEA models with restricted multipliers have been used to refine efficiency evaluations by imposing additional information. Existing DEA models for evaluating Olympic medals do not focus on multiplier restrictions regarding input. To fill this research gap, this study incorporates a data fitting technique of medal prediction using ordinary least squares regression in input multiplier restrictions of the conventional DEA model. We show that the efficiency of the proposed model can be decomposed into the achievement ratio of substantial medal total and the unit value index of medals. Such decompositions can be used to analyze the effectiveness of host nations and athlete development initiatives. For an illustrative empirical application, we examine the target that the Brazilian Olympic Committee (BOC) set for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games (Rio 2016). Our results explain the extremely high feasibility of Brazil’s target of being in the top 10 medals table in Rio 2016.

Twin Types: Variations and Common Themes/Twin Research Reviews: Birth Weight and Brain Development; Twinning and Vocabulary Knowledge; Fetal Loss in Twin Pregnancy; Twin-Family Olympic Medal Winners/Human Interest: Young Twin Soldiers; Twin-Run Laundry; Male-Female Pair and Politics; Twin-Based Graphic Novel; Twin Sisters' Deliveries.

Modern reproductive technology and revisions of conventional family structures have yielded a curious array of twin-like sibships. Many of these pairings pose the same rearing questions and educational issues for parents and teachers as do ordinary monozygotic and dizygotic twins. This article considers how we classify these sibships, given the important implications for the pair members, their families, their friends and the professionals who care for them. Next, reviews of research on twins' birth weight and brain development, twinning and vocabulary knowledge, fetal loss in twin pregnancy and twin-family Olympic medal winners are presented. The final topic covers recent media attention to young twin soldiers, a twin-run laundry, a male-female pair's political differences, a twin-based graphic novel and twin sisters' deliveries.

4th Place Finishers and Bronze Medalists: Differences in Olympic Career Outcomes

This paper presents evidence on whether winning an Olympic medal can impact a debut athlete’s future Olympic career in terms of future Olympic Games attended and medals won. Olympedia’s comprehensive data set spanning Athens 1896 to PyeongChang 2018 is used. The benefits for earning an Olympic medal vary based on time period, gender, and outcome of interest. Overall and in the recent era from Lillehammer 1994 to PyeongChang 2018, there is evidence to suggest a debut athlete who just misses out on a medal performs as well in the future as the athlete right ahead of him or her who wins a medal.

Pharmacists in Action

Pharmacists in Action

Olympic medalists of the modern summer Olympic games 1896–2016

ABSTRACT The aim of the work in the presented paper was the creation and subsequent distribution of a database of Olympic medallists of the modern Summer Olympic Games in the period 1896-2016. We examined historical statistics from the perspective of an individual approach; or more specifically, for each Olympic medallist as an individual athlete awarded with an Olympic medal. The results are presented on a map showing the number of medallists in each country. In total, we recorded 33152 Olympic medals in the database altogether, which were won by a total of 24287 athletes. These represented a total of 149 countries, including those that no longer exist due to geopolitical changes in the last century. All medals awarded at the level of states and individual sports are displayed in a detailed preview on the website, which is an integral part of the submitted paper.

Birthplace of Brazilian athletes who competed in Tokyo 2020 and the states variables related to the chances of being a medalist

The purpose of this study was to describe the birthplace of Brazilian Tokyo 2020 Olympic athletes, and to investigate the states-related variables associated with winning an Olympic medal. Data were collected based on the Brazilian Olympic Committee official list of athletes competing at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games and from ESTADIC research (2016) and Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Binary Logistic Regression was used with the purpose to estimate the chances of the states have athletes who won an Olympic medal. All the analysis was performed in JAMOVA, considering p<0.05. Sample comprised 303 athletes, from the five Brazilian regions. The model comparisons indicated that the second model was the best to explain the chances of the state have an athlete who won an Olympic medal (Model 2 versus Model 1: c² = 21.41; p<0.001; Model 3 versus Model 2: c² = 2.77; p = 0.429). So, age (OR= 0.91; CI95% = -0.15 – -0.2) and to be part in team sports (OR= 4.36; CI95% = 0.80 – 2.15) are associated with chances to winning an Olympic medal. The most of Brazilian Olympic athletes in Tokyo 2020 were born in Southeast region, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro states. The best model to explain associations with chances to winning a medal was composed to meso-level variables, and it was not found significant association between the macro-level characteristics investigated with the chances to be a medalist.