The prediction of swimming performance in competition from behavioral information

The swimming performances of the Canadian Team at the 1976 Olympic Games were categorized as being improved or worse than previous best times in the events contested. The two groups had been previously assessed on the Psychological Inventories for Competitive Swimmers. A stepwise multiple-discriminant analysis of the inventory responses revealed that 13 test questions produced a perfect discrimination of group membership. The resultant discriminant functions for predicting performance classification were applied to the test responses of 157 swimmers at the 1977 Canadian Winter National Swimming Championships. Using the same performance classification criteria the accuracy of prediction was not better than chance in three of four sex by performance classifications. This yielded a failure to locate a set of behavioral factors which determine swimming performance improvements in elite competitive circumstances. The possibility of sets of factors which do not discriminate between performances in similar environments or between similar groups of swimmers was raised.