ESPN’s Peter Keating has started a new blog focusing on statistics and analytics in sports. He’s kicked off his blog with several interesting posts about research regarding the Olympics.

– What causes Olympic records to fall?

The key to determining whether or not something essential is changing in peak athletic performance is to try somehow to untangle basic talent from technology, doping and other external forces that disrupt the progression of world records….So what was behind this progress? “Perhaps the most important reason is simple,” Berry wrote. “The world population has more than tripled [since the start of the modern Olympics].”…Which means everything else — training, technology, doping — accounts for a distinct minority of the variation in world records. As Berry wrote: “Athletes are not getting better, nor are they better trained — there are just more of them.”

– How has figure skating judging reform affected scoring? The law of unintended consequences makes an appearance, and it isn’t pretty.

– How did the prognosticators do in picking Olympic winners? Keating discusses the different systems and their potential weaknesses.

– He also discusses some of my work on this blog.

So, if the Olympinomics posts here have interested you, be sure to check out Peter’s blog. And after the Olympics, keep an eye out for more interesting analytical discussions regarding other sports.

I am pleased to announce the launch of College Basketball at Sports-Reference.com, the latest addition to the Sports Reference family of web sites. We have had plans to launch a college basketball site for quite some time, but for one reason or another we always ran into roadblocks, most of them data-related. However, thanks to the efforts of researcher extraordinaire Kevin Johnson, we now have a college basketball database that we believe to be second-to-none. Let me tell you a little bit about what the site does (and doesn’t) have:

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The 1998 Games in Nagano changed the landscape of international hockey forever because they were the first Olympics in which NHL players were allowed to compete under their countries’ flags. As a result, Olympic hockey quickly became the most prestigious non-Stanley Cup tournament in the sport because it combined the game’s greatest players with some of its most storied rivalries on a stage few events could match. In other words, for all intents and purposes, the modern era of international hockey began in 1998.

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In my previous Olympinomics posts, I have looked how the age of winners has differed across sport and gender. The general findings indicate that athleticism tends to generate younger performance peaks and that women tend to peak before men. But, what about time?

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In case you haven’t been following the action so far, the Canadian Men’s Curling rink is scary dominant in these 2010 Olympics. In our database we have the results of all Olympic curling competitions since 1998 (when the IOC added the sport to the Games), and Canada’s performance so far has been off the charts. Look at the curling percentages (the % of the time the player accomplishes what the skip called for before the shot) for Canada’s regulars in the tournament:

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Fellow GMU alum Scott Beaulier has a theory as to why there are no good Scandinavian figure skaters.

[T]he Soviet Union and Communist Bloc countries crowded out the Scandinavians in skating events. Why? Because highly centralized economies in the Eastern Bloc had an incentive to focus production on more obvious, big outputs. Things like state-of-the-art ice rinks and basketball courts were visible results of central planning that the leaders could point to as deliverables (the machine-like Soviet boxer from Rocky IV symbolizes this point); focusing more resources on skiing (both downhill and cross-country) and running–even if it produced more gold medals–wouldn’t provide the same visible results in the way of infrastructure improvements and big public projects.

By pouring money into skating, hoops, and hockey, the Soviets became pretty strong in these areas (at a high cost, of course!). Their success in these sports isn’t all that surprising: centrally planned economies can do a decent job at producing a few particular end products. A 1993 paper by Tollison and Shughart titled “Going for Gold” (Blackwell subscription required) seems to support this thesis.

The rational response for Scandinavian countries was to focus more of their energies on the sports they have a comparative (and perhaps a geographic) advantage: skiing, ski jumping, etc.

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Keith Law posed this interesting question via Twitter.

So my wife + I discuss this every winter Olympics: why are there no good figure skaters from Scandinavia?

Scandinavian countries tend to be quite good at most winter sports, which is no surprise given their climate; however, no Scandinavian athlete has won a figure skating medal since 1936. The table below lists the total Olympic medals won by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden (I’m trying to be as inclusive as possible) and when the most recent medal was won (singles competitions only).

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One of the consistent findings in the academic literature on aging and athletic performance is that women tend to reach their athletic peak earlier than men. This difference is stronger in strength and speed events which tend to peak younger than endurance events for both genders. In this post, I compare the average age of medal winners by gender to see their differences across sports.

Below, I report the differences in the average age of Olympic medal winners by sport where there are distinct differences by gender.

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Apolo Ohno may be the most recognized American participating in this year’s games. Not only is he a Dancing with the Stars champion, but he’s competing in his third Olympics. And unless you haven’t been listening to any of the commentary, you’re probably aware that he is attempting to win more medals in the Winter Olympics than any other American. With his win Saturday night in the 1,500 meters Short Track, he tied Bonnie Blair for six total medals. Even if Ohno does not surpass Blair, his performance may be more impressive considering that he has competed across Olympic games that were all four years apart. Blair benefited from the short gap between the 1992 and 1994 games.

But why am I calling him an old fogey? At 27 Ohno isn’t even close to the oldest person to win a medal in the Winter Olympics. Norway’s Martin Stixrud took the bronze medal in men’s figure skating during the 1920 games at age 44.5. And it’s not just a product of time. In 2006, Hilde Gjermundshaug-Pedersen of Norway won a bronze medal in cross country skiing.

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If you’re like me, you like the Winter Olympics; not because you know much about the sports or participants, but because it’s fun to watch people play around in the snow. And while I enjoy sitting down front of the TV to watch whatever NBC decides to show me, just staring at screen and cheering for the athlete with the saddest side-story doesn’t feel right.  For years I’ve been watching baseball through an analytical lens, trying to better understand the factors that matter most. I’ve blogged about it extensively at Sabernomics.com, my book The Baseball Economist was published three years ago, and my latest book Hot Stove Economics will be published this coming fall.

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