How good were the performances at the Tokyo Olympics?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
A year later than planned, The Tokyo Olympics, have now finished. Thousands of athletes have competed in events that few thought might go ahead and there’s been record success.
This week we take a look at Olympic numbers – how many records were broken in Tokyo, what factors might have influenced the races and what else can the data tell us?
Tim Harford speaks to Dr Joel Mason, who runs the blog, Trackademic.
Producer: Olivia Noon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We all guide to newsworthy numbers |
| 0:05.8 | around the globe and I'm Tim Harford. For the last few weeks, the greatest athletes in the |
| 0:14.0 | world have been competing in the Tokyo Olympics. The event has now finished but for stats fans like |
| 0:19.8 | me, the good bit is just getting started. Now we get to analyse the data. The entire games were |
| 0:26.6 | postponed by a year and coronavirus was a constant obstacle so after all that we're the sporting |
| 0:33.6 | performances any good. In this programme we're going to look at the sport that gets the most |
| 0:38.8 | medals and attention at the Olympics, the athletics or track and field. To help us do that we're |
| 0:44.4 | going to be helped by the sports scientist Dr Joel Mason. He runs the blog Trackademic and he's |
| 0:50.8 | been analysing athletic performances to see what's going on. The beauty of Trackademic is that it's |
| 0:56.8 | accessible to everybody. Typically there is a decent spread of medals and an Olympic leading spread |
| 1:02.3 | of medals. But World Athletics have come out and said it's the largest spread of nations on |
| 1:07.7 | the medal table in over 20 years. There were 43 countries that won medals in Trackademic and now |
| 1:13.1 | in history there are over 100 countries that have won Trackademic and Field medals. I think it |
| 1:17.2 | was India and Pakeena Faso won their first track and field Olympic medals in Tokyo. So it really |
| 1:22.5 | is a global sport. So Joel there were some standout performances in Tokyo, the men's and women's |
| 1:30.5 | 400 metre hurdles. The records were just smashed and I think the whole podium set massive personal |
| 1:37.3 | bests. Are they in any way representative? Was Tokyo unusual compared to say the previous games |
| 1:43.4 | at Rio in terms of performances? The World Records in Tokyo were about on par with Rio and London. |
| 1:50.0 | So there were three World Records and the 400 metre hurdles for men and women and the women's |
| 1:53.6 | triple jump. So the World Records and Olympic Records are about on par with what we typically see |
| 1:58.9 | after taking into account the new events with the mixed relay. But it was really the depth of |
| 2:02.7 | performance and where the difference was made this year. I guess there aren't that many World |
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