63 Pacing behavior development in adolescent swimmers 4 Methods All procedures used in the study were approved by the Local Ethical Committee of the University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, The Netherlands (201900334) in the spirit of the Helsinki Declaration. The requirement for informed consent of the participants was waived given the fact that the study involved the analysis of publicly available data and analyses were group-based. Data collection All available 100m and 200m freestyle long course performance data (i.e., date of the race, total race time and available 50m split times) of both male and female swimmers performing between 2000 and 2021, were collected from Swimrankings’ database (Swimrankings, 2021). This resulted in 2,857,181 (100m freestyle) and 1,897,872 (200m freestyle) observations. The assumption was made that all swimmers chose the front crawl during the freestyle events. Performance data were collected from 113 countries across the world. The date of birth of all included swimmers was collected using the same database. Data processing Swim performances over 180s (100m freestyle) and 360s (200m freestyle) were excluded from the analysis to ensure a homogeneous dataset. Performance data were classified per swimming season, starting on the 1st of September and ending on the 31st of August of the next calendar year. Data from the 1st of January 2008-2010 were excluded from analysis, because of the impact of full-body polyurethane swimsuits on swimming performance in that period (Tiozzo et al., 2009; Toussaint et al., 2002; Tomikawa & Nomura., 2009). Performance data from season 2019-2020 were excluded as competitions and training opportunities were disturbed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,773,387 observations (100m freestyle) and 1,842,992 (200m freestyle) observations remained. For each swimmer, the Season Best Time (SBT) per swimming season was used for further analysis. Age at SBT was determined using the swimmer’s date of birth. Race experience was defined as the cumulative number of races of a specific event, which the swimmers had completed before SBT.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw