Championship Factors: Olympic Athletes

NBC uses a lot of air time to bring these close up looks of the athletes to the viewing public. And the network did a good job of communicating the nature of the time, money and energy sacrifices that the athletes and their families need to make to make it to this elite level of sports.

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Over the years, I have been lucky enough to counsel a number Olympic athletes including four gold medal winners. These athletes were from a variety of sports including gymnastics, weight lifting, boxing, skiing and rowing.

This year, two clients of mine brought home gold medals. Because of client confidentiality regulations, I can not share very much about them. However, it was quite thrilling to see people who sat in my office on the gold medal platform. I have also interviewed three or four previous gold medal winners for my weekly column.

Not surprisingly, these athletes have great discipline, focus and resiliency. They also have great passion for their sport and their teammates. They also have strong feelings about representing their country.

Like the rest of us, they also have fear, anxiety and interpersonal conflicts with people in their lives.

What is really striking to me, however, is the fact that to a person, all of these remarkable athletes are quite humble, soft spoken and very respectful.

None of them were arrogant or grandiose. Rather, they were all quite genuine and down to earth.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7228225 

Olympic Medal Count - Factors

As the Olympics wind down, many sports fans are looking at the number of medals won by each country.  Historically, the medals compiled by participating countries has been related to several key factors, including:

• population
• financial and/or economic resources, and
• home field advantage.  

This year, the current leaders include the U.S., China, Great Britain, and Russia.  The always interesting Bleacher Report writes:

It should stand to reason that a country among the global leaders in available financial and human resources would be far more successful in athletic events that require elite athleticism, expensive training and state-of-the-art facilities.  

And, we have seen patriotism at the Olympic Games lead to some historic triumphs, such as the 1980 Miracle on Ice.   NPR reports more on the home field advantage, academic papers on the "Olympic Medal Analyses" -- and even an additional factor: communism!  Right around the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, two academic papers on medal counts came out, by Bernard of Dartmouth, and Johnson of Colorado College.  Here is a link to Bernard's paper.

Check these nice graphics out by the Huffington Post -- which shows totals medals, as well as medals divided by population or GDP.   Numbers -- and pictures -- can tell interesting stories!

Olympics: Revisiting a Popular Article

With the 2012 Olympics set to start in London (and today being July 4th), we thought we would revisit one of our more popular articles -- on the 1980 Miracle on Ice.  In that article, we looked at concepts of sports psychology and did an interesting and fun analysis (including Monte Carlo simulations) to study the odds of the U.S. ice hockey team winning the gold medal.

Herb Brooks was a true master of sports psychology, graduating from college with a degree in psychology.  Brooks knew he had a chance to make some noise at the Olympics - especially with the US hosting the Winter Olympics.  Brooks worked at gathering players who could lift their games to special levels -- and could also play as part of a team where the sum of the parts were greater than the individual pieces.  

On goaltender Jim Craig and other players, Brooks said, "I don't want the best players, I want the right players."  Brooks knew what he was doing when he put his 1980 team together, piece by piece.  He also knew how to "push the players' buttons" and was tough on many members of that Miracle on Ice -- but eventually created one of the most beloved U.S. sports stories of the twentieth century.

Based on key hockey statistics and expectations, we performed a Monte Carlo simulation to study the odds of the United States hockey team winning the gold medal. Monte Carlo methods use a random process to solve complicated problems...

In a similar manner, hockey games can be modeled based on certain random variables and key statistics, including shots on goal, save percentage and shot efficiency. If we model the United States team as a seventh seed, the probability of the United States winning the gold medal approaches odds as high as 1 in 1,000. 

But the United States turned out to be a stronger team than expected. Entering the medal round of the Olympics, the United States and Soviet teams were undefeated. The United States was 4-0-1, outscoring their opponents by 25-10, while the Russians were 5-0, outscoring their opponents by 51-11. The Soviet goaltenders, Vladislav Tretiak and Vladimir Myshkin, averaged a solid 88.2 save percentage, and the American goalie Jim Craig had a 91.7 save percentage.

If we base our simulations on the team’s performance in the tournament, the odds could have been as low as 17-to-1 for the United States win the gold medal.

The entire article was originally published in the NY Times in 2010, on the 30th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice.  Read more here:
http://vancouver2010.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/how-miraculous-was-the-miracle/?scp=1&sq=miraculous%20miracle&st=cse