EVALUATING THE REPRESENTATION OF THE DIFFERENT WORLD STATES ON INTERNATIONAL FOIL MEN CONTESTS, BASED ON OBJECTIVE CRITERIONS

• Main Authors: Krassimir Petkov, Valentine Panayotov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Montenegrin Sports Academy and Faculty for Sport and Physical Education 2013-07-01
• Series: Sport Mont
• Subjects: fencing; foil; rankings; medals; probability density function; rank-list; objective evaluation
• Online Access: http://www.sportmont.ucg.ac.me/clanci/SportMont_37-38-39_p35-40.pdf
• ISSN: 1451-7485; 2337-0351

The development of the foil sports discipline was analized, using the data for the ratings of the international competitions managed by FIE throught the last 10 years. We estimated the probability dansity functions /PDF/ of the number of participations of the world states in all kinds of contests and found that they are very leptokurtic and skewed. We reached the same results for the PDFs of the rankings up to 16-th place and the medals won. We found that three states – Italy, Germany and France - dominate over the others with comparatively few contestants who won disproportionately large number of the medals and top 16 rantings. For example these three states won 32.8% of the medals with 24.7% of the participations on class A and Grand Prix contests and with 42% of the participations they won 67% of the medals on World championships . Additionally to this raw data and the two indexes we constructed based on the ratings – EP and EM we introduced Medals Index /MI/ - the ratio between the medals won and the top 16 rankings for each nation for every kind of contest for the last 10 years (2003-2012). Using the first two of the indexes we found that the most successful state in almost all competitions /with one exception – the Olympic games/ is Italy. The MI results are not so undisputable – there are lagging (on the whole) countries which penetrated to the medals in almost every kind of foil men tournament. We also recognized that the previously established preliminary evidences for the existence of a positive monotonous dependence between the medals won and the rankings up to 16-th place and the total number of participations is not unquestionable.