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Performance streaks—runs of successful performance—are great in allowing us to discern between luck and skill as well as understanding the statistics of the extremes of ability. (Note: if you came to this post thinking I was writing about streaking at the Olympics, sorry to disappoint.)
Alan Reifman, a professor at Texas Tech University and author of The Hot Hand: The Statistics Behind Sports' Greatest Streaks is an expert in how streaks work. And in anticipation of the Olympics, he posted a great series on his blog about the many performance streaks at the Olympics.
It turns out that there a lot of streaks at the Olympics. For example:
To my mind, no Olympic streak is more noteworthy -- either for its duration or its ending -- than that of the U.S. men's basketball program. As indicated below in a chart I created from Wikipedia data, the American men entered the 1972 gold-medal game against the Soviet Union with the U.S. having won all seven gold medals ever contested in Olympic history and with a 62-game winning streak (some sources list it as a 63-game streak, but they may be counting a first-round forfeit win over Spain in 1936). As the chart also shows, some of the greatest basketball players of all-time, such as Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, and Bill Bradley played for the U.S. during basketball's early decades as an Olympic sport.
Check out the entire series, which begins with this post.
Top Image: Phil Roeder/Flickr/CC
