The error bars indicate +/-1 standard deviation, and as I suspected, the point at ‘0’ is a
dramatic outlier (the odds of this happening by coincidence is 0% with many decimal places...).
In other words, there really are a lot more results having times
ending on round-numbers than there should be, statistically speaking.
So what is going on here? My explanation for the excess results before
big numbers like 10 and 20 minutes can be explained by people hustling in the
final seconds, but why would more people report a time of 20:20 than 20:21?
Or 15:50 instead of 15:51? Do you think people are rounding their scores?
Do you think people are making typos? Is there a bug in the data submission
forms? Are judges subconsciously rounding up or down?
Disclaimer: I am not a representative of CrossFit, and I am not the copyright holder of the
source data presented here (I read it from the Leaderboard). I’m just a fan of CrossFit and a
data scientist.
-Max
max@observatorydata.com
Click here to download a .csv file with the source data for all 2017 Open Results, which I scraped from the Leaderboard.