400 Meter Dash
One Lap Wonder
Just a Quarter of a Mile
The 400 meter dash is a running event of the summer Olympics. This is a sprint consisting of one lap around the track. It is running a quarter of a mile. The runners sucess in the sport lays in the athletes sprinting capibility and there endurance throughout. The United States dominate the mens 400 meter. The world record being set by Michael Johnson with a time of 43.18 seconds in 1999.
Who is Better?
The 400 meter dash is an Olympic sport for both men and women. Although the men and women do not compete against each other. Using data from the past 40 years we can see when the women and the men will or where the same speed.
The End Game
Our goal in this project is to use the gold medallist times for men and women over the last 40 years and create a data graph that will show us mathematical equations. This will then give us predictions of when the men and womens performances will be the same.
The Data
The data starts in 1976, forty years ago. The data ends in 2012, four years ago. This was the most recent summer Olympic. List 1 consist of the years, List 2 consist of the men gold metal times, and List 3 consist of the women gold metal times.
The Last 40 Years (Scatter Plot)
The yellow squares represents the female 400 meter times and the Blue squares represent the male 400 meter times.
Linear Regression (Lines of Best Fit)
The red line represents the females trend for the Olympic gold medallist. The blue line represents the mens trend for the Olympic gold medallist.
The Intersection Point
Explanation
The intersection of the two lines represents the year when the men and women were running the same speed. The red line is the women, they are steadily increasing. This means they are slowly getting slower. The blue line is the men, they are steadily decreasing at a slower rate than the women. This means that they are getting faster. Although, the women are slowing down faster than the men are speeding up. This year it is predicted that men will out-perform women.
The X-Coordinate
The x-axis point shows that the year. Our intersction point shows that the year women and men ran the same 400 meter time was in 1837. Although, the Olympics did not begin until the year 1896. Therefore further explaining how this data and intersection are just predictions.
The Y-Coordinate
The y-axis shows the time of the runners. The time of the runners on our intersection point (according to our data), would be approximately 46.38 seconds. That would be the time that the men and women would both run in the year 1837.
Michael Johnson
Mens World Record Holder
43.18 seconds
Marita Koch
Womens World Record Holder
47.6 seconds
Harry 'Butch' Reynolds
Mens 2nd Place World Record Holder
43.29 seconds
Sources
"400m Men | Athletics | Videos, Photos, Olympic Medallists." 400m Men |
Athletics | Videos, Photos, Olympic Medallists. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
"400m Women | Athletics | Videos, Photos, Olympic Medallists." 400m Women |
Athletics | Videos, Photos, Olympic Medallists. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
All images found on Google Images