A couple of weeks ago, I received a Trigger request from Wyatt: “In general, are older athletes able to maintain performance over the course of a world cup season vs younger athletes who might burn out faster? Gut feel says yes, but what does the data say?”
He checked off the boxes for all seasons, but to keep the data manageable I looked at the last three seasons only. And since we’re talking about form during the season, I only included athletes that participated in 17 races, roughly two thirds of all races, in a season.
He imagined some kind of plot with season races on the horizontal axis, and a measure of performance on the vertical one, aggregated by age. I started off with his concept, but found it hard to see the trees through the forest, so I combined ages in groups (under 25, 25-30, 30-35, and over 35. For the performance I used race results on a race-to-race basis. I did try comparing it to the athletes’ season averages, but in the end the individual results gave the better view. Looking at all individual races also made it hard to see trends with the many ups & downs, so I used the average ranks per trimester, resulting in the following visuals:
As concluded on the visual itself, the data does not provide a strong indication that younger athletes’ performances decline more than those of older athletes when getting to the final trimester of the season.
It should be noted that race results obviously also depend on other athletes (take a GOAT-in-the-making JT Boe and his last season, which will impacts his and all other age groups) and the form they are in.
I believe there would be value in doing this kind of analysis for individual athletes, or perhaps athletes from a specific nation using the same coach. But when aggregating athletes by age or age group, the numbers just tend to regress toward the mean, making it hard to find trends that can be conclusive.
Thank you Wyatt for the Trigger request; if you have any comments, connect with me on Twitter or Instagram.