Selecting the Better Athlete: A Story-Driven Statistics Tutorial

Author

Prof CKDash Tutorials

Story setup: Two athletes (A and B) each run a 100 m sprint 10 times with 5‑minute intervals.
Their recorded times (in seconds) are:

• Athlete A: 20, 21, 20, 19, 20, 21, 19, 20, 20, 20
  
• Athlete B: 17, 21, 22, 22, 19, 16, 21, 24, 20, 18

Both averages are 20 s — but who is the more consistent and therefore the better choice?
We’ll use Statistics to find out.

1 1) Setup & Data

# Install/load required packages
pkgs <- c("tidyverse", "knitr", "kableExtra", "ggplot2", "scales", "ggdist")
to_install <- pkgs[!(pkgs %in% installed.packages()[, "Package"])]
if (length(to_install)) install.packages(to_install, repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org")

package 'svglite' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
package 'distributional' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
package 'quadprog' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
package 'kableExtra' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
package 'ggdist' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in
    C:\Users\CKDash\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpgNdh7Y\downloaded_packages