Competition performance

Tracking competitive performance is probably one of the most important parameter to follow and to track for coaches and athletes, as it has also been called as a golden standard. This is the goal that the athlete trains for and will be evaluated accordingly. Especially important is it for inidividual disciplines, as in those cases its correlation to actual performance is very high. In team disciplines, one athlete might have a very „bad“ day, but the team is successful. Therefore, in team disciplines individual performance should be separated from the overall result.

If a sport specific performance test that is very close to competitive performance and can easily be fitted in the annual training plan,  they can easily be compared. However, there are always athletes who perform well in tests and lot worse during the competition and vice versa. Some of the reasons are listed below:

• Precompetitive anxiety – can have influence in both directions. If the anxiety is optimal the influence is positive. If anxiety is too low or too high, it probably has negative influence to the result
• Coping with other competitors
• Race tactics – may influence if you are les accustomed with the particular scenario that happend during the race. For example, the athlete has a very good final spurt, but the tempo was very high from the start until the end of the race that eliminated the ability to make a spurt.

Therefore all those confounders should be recorded after the competition to training diary, to be remembered if the race is analyzed.

To be continued….