Does anyone know how to get the data from World Athletics?
This is a nice looking analysis, but it seems a bit shallow. I would have liked to see other time periods.
My hypothesis is that if you picked almost any arbitrary date, and did a "pre and post" comparison like this, you would see similar distributions. It is just a fact that times have always been getting faster and faster.
It would be interesting if the introduction of super spikes resulted in a bigger "jump" than other time periods. I'm not sure that it does.
I'm planning on running a more thorough analysis and am working on a Shiny tool to explore the data at more granularity. The time series of avg. times year over year, by month is super interesting if you wanna take a look :)
I can post a link here to my GitHub repo once posted so you can check out the data!