1. How Much the Swimming Performance Leading to Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games Was Impaired Due to the Covid-19 Lockdown?
- Author
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Costa, Mário J., Garrido, Nuno D., Marinho, Daniel A., and Santos, Catarina C.
- Subjects
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STATISTICS , *COVID-19 , *SCIENTIFIC observation , *ACQUISITION of data methodology , *ANALYSIS of variance , *RETROSPECTIVE studies , *MEDICAL records , *REPEATED measures design , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics , *STAY-at-home orders , *SPORTS events , *SWIMMING , *ATHLETIC ability , *DATA analysis - Abstract
The aim of this study was to analyze the progression and stability in the performance of world-ranked swimmers from 2015 to 2020, and the impairment induced by the COVID-19 lockdown. An observational retrospective design over five consecutive competitive seasons was selected. FINA´s male Top-50 who were qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games were considered in freestyle, backstroke, backstroke, and butterfly events. A total of 515 male swimmers and 2060 season-best performances were analyzed. All data was retrieved from two open-access and public websites (Swimrankings and Swimcloud). Repeated measures ANOVA followed by the Bonferroni post-hoc test was performed to analyze the variation between seasons. Stabilization in performance was assessed using spearman correlation coefficients. A significant improvement in performance ≈0.5-2.5% was found in most of the strokes and race distances until the 2018-2019 season. The 2020 lockdown impaired the performance by 1-2%. Moderate to high associations were found in the 2017-2018 season when considering the 2019-2020 performance. The breaststroke was the only stroke with a moderate-high stability (r > 0.40) in all race distances considering the overall time period. It can be concluded that world-ranked swimmers' performance was impaired by 1-2% due to the COVID-19 lockdown, returning to levels that were reached two years earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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