Conventional wisdom (and probably a fair bit of physiology research) holds that going fast over short distances is a skill we tend to lose as we age. Â Are fast World Cup sprinters younger than fast distance skiers?
Let’s look at the age distributions of top thirty racers in sprinting and distance races since the 2003-2004 season:
Certainly looks like top-30 distance skiers are slightly older and a simple t-test confirms a significant difference of about 2.1 years for the men and 1.5 years for the women (although the statistical significance is most likely largely a factor of the huge sample size here).
What happens if we zoom in on even faster skiers? Â Like, say, top ten skiers…
Just eyeballing it, it appears that the difference is even larger. Â And again, the t-test’s confirm this suspicion. Â The differences bumps up slightly to 2.8 years for the men and 1.9 years for the women.
Of course, this is just a difference in the average age for sprinting and distance racing. Â As the distributions above show, there’s still quite a bit of variation in ages for fast skiers in both disciplines.
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