Crowding at the Front of the Marathon Packs
Sanjib Sabhapandit, Satya N. Majumdar, S. Redner

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the distribution of finish time gaps in major marathons, revealing a saturation and a sociologically influenced maximum near the top finishers, challenging naive expectations of increasing gaps.
Contribution
It provides a probabilistic explanation for the observed saturation and maximum in finish time gaps among top marathon runners.
Findings
Gaps increase from middle to around 20th place
Gaps saturate among top 10-20 finishers
A sociological factor influences the maximum gap near the top
Abstract
We study the crowding of near-extreme events in the time gaps between successive finishers in major international marathons. Naively, one might expect these gaps to become progressively larger for better-placing finishers. While such an increase does indeed occur from the middle of the finishing pack down to approximately 20th place, the gaps saturate for the first 10-20 finishers. We give a probabilistic account of this feature. However, the data suggests that the gaps have a weak maximum around the 10th place, a feature that seems to have a sociological origin.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAdventure Sports and Sensation Seeking · Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts
