1500 Meter Dash
A comparison of male and female performance in the Olympics
Run!
One of the most popular track events the Olympics is the 1500 meter dash. Being just 100 meters short of a mile, it is the perfect distance event. Requiring incredible speed as well as stamina, only the best of the best run this event.
Why?
The reason for this study is to pinpoint the exact year that women's preformance will surpass men's, or vice versa. Using data we can predict trends for the next Olympic years and see which gender is performing better than the other.
Data
Mens and women's Olympic gold medalist times for the 1500 meter dash from 1976-1988
More Data
Mens and women's Olympic gold medalist times for the 1500 meter dash from 1992-2004
Even More Data
Mens and women's Olympic gold medalist times for the 1500 meter dash from 1976-1988
Scattered Times
This is a scatter plot of all the 1500 meter dash gold medalist times from the past 40 years– that's 10 summer Olympics. The red X's repersent the men's times, and blue repersent the women's. In this case, the lower the points are in the graph, the faster the time.
Trends Over Time
The lines of best fit show the trend of how the runners times change over the years. Pretty much, it's a way of showing whether the runners are getting faster or slower over time. Again, the red marks the men's times, the women's are blue. The red line has a slight downward slope, meaning over time the runners are getting faster, and the women's has a slight upward slope so they are actually getting slower.
And the Winner is...
According to my data, the year that men and women were equally fast, would be 1896. And after the year 1896, men became faster. However, there was no Olympics at that time, meaning that men have been faster than women since the beginning of the Olympics. The blue line has a positive slope, meaning women will continue gradually getting slower forever. And the red line has a negative slope so, men will get faster over time. The lines will never intersect again so men will always be faster than women.
X-Coordinate
At the intersection point, the X-Coordinate is 1896.14, and when put into context, is translated to the year 1896. That would have been the year that men and women preformed equally in the Olympics, but there was no Olympics at the time.
Y-Coordinate
The Y-Coordinate at the intersection point is 228.97, which would be changed to 3 minuites and 82 seconds. The means that 3:82 was the average time that both men and women shared for running the 1500 meter dash in the year 1896.