Olympics 1968

A post-mortem

Abstract

The results from swimming, track, and field events in the 1968 Olympics were compared to world records which existed at the time. Results of past Games were also compared to those in Mexico City. In the past, winning performance has averaged 2.9% off the world marks hut in the recent Olympics it was only 0.9% different. Winning times in swimming and running, also expressed as a proportion of the world records, were plotted against the duration of the event. It was noted that the longer the event the farther was the winning time from the world mark. These results were compared to previous experiments in which running and swimming times of individuals were contrasted to their times at sea level. Results from these predictive studies were within 1–2% of the actual results in the Olympics.