Using ShotLink data that records information on every stroke taken on the PGA Tour, this paper introduces a new metric to assess putting. The methodology is based on ideas from spatial statistics where a spatial map of each green is constructed. The spatial map provides estimates of the expected...

Golf is a popular form of competition, and it is traditional for amateur players to use a handicapping system when competing against one another in order to make the competition more interesting and perhaps more equitable. Additionally, the scramble, where each player plays a ball and the...

Sports teams have incentives to put more effort into games with an immediate effect on standings compared to games that do not, possibly affecting outcome uncertainty. We develop a measure of game outcome uncertainty, game importance (GI), that captures how each game affects a team’s standing...

Whether the nature of the risks associated with climbing high-altitude (8000 m) peaks is in some sense “controllable” is a longstanding debate in the mountaineering community. Well-known mountaineers David Roberts and Ed Viesturs explore this issue in their recent memoirs. Roberts views the...

Nowadays many approaches that analyze and predict the results of football matches are based on bookmakers’ ratings. It is commonly accepted that the models used by the bookmakers contain a lot of expertise as the bookmakers’ profits and losses depend on the performance of their models. One...

We present a regularized logistic regression model for evaluating player contributions in hockey. The traditional metric for this purpose is the plus-minus statistic, which allocates a single unit of credit (for or against) to each player on the ice for a goal. However, plus-minus scores measure...

In this paper we examine the relationship of the speed of a set in volleyball with the outcome of the attack. A total of 1777 sets of a single male university level volleyball team were photographed using high speed cameras so that the time the set was in the air could be measured with accuracy...

A detailed study of the bank shot trajectory was performed with a focus on breaking it down into its significant features. The bank shot’s effectiveness was examined in terms of the player’s ability to accurately impart launch speed, back spin, pitch angle, and side angle. It was shown that...

Gender gaps in absolute performance at the Olympics are well-established, while gender differences in relative performance have not been considered. We analyzed time trends in male and female performance improvement for medal results in all individual athletics and swimming events in Olympic...

What is the best male and female athletics performance in history? We seek to answer this question for Olympic distance track events by simultaneously modelling race performances over all Olympic distances and all times. Our model uses techniques from a branch of statistics called extreme value...