To give athletes the opportunity to objectively compare their own performance as well as the performance of other athletes across events, we have developed a method to calculate benchmark times for most events. On this page you can find out what this is all about and what the data obtained in this way tells us about the athletes’ performances.

 

Benchmark Times

The swim and bike benchmarks are calculated times that a top elite triathlete would theoretically achieve in the respective discipline. Meaning the swim benchmark is the time that one of the top swimmers amongst the pro triathletes would need, while the bike benchmark is the time that a top cyclist amongst pro triathletes would need. The overall benchmark is calculated based on swim and bike benchmark. This is an overall time that usually not even the top triathlon pros would achieve in an aquabike race, since the best swimmers are usually not the best cyclists in the triathlon circuit. It is therefore a time that is not achievable under normal circumstances. However, it can be used as an objective starting point for comparing performances across races. For example, if athlete A is 20% slower than the benchmark time in a race, while athlete B is 25% slower than the benchmark time in a different race, it means that the performance of athlete A is stronger by that difference. Or in other words, that athlete A would have beaten athlete B if they had been racing in the same race.

When you click on “Show Benchmark & PS” on a result page, the benchmark times and Performance Score appear on top of the results and the time differences now displayed underneath each split time are the differences to the referring benchmark times, which looks like this:

In the result section of your athlete profile (or any other athlete’s profile) you can also click on “Compare to Benchmark”. You will then see the Performance Score of each overall time and split time with the time gaps of your times compared to the benchmarks. This allows you to directly compare your performances over different races.

The benchmark times are calculated for most races. But the calculation requires a certain minimum amount of available data to bring accurate results. For this reason some events with very little numbers of participants have no benchmark times.

 

Performance Score

The Performance Score (PS) is a number between 0 and 10 that shows the strength of an athlete, based on the time gaps to the benchmark times. The closer an athlete gets to a benchmark time the higher his PS will be.

For most events (except those with a very little number of participants) we calculate the Performance Score for swim, bike and overall time for every athlete. As an Aquabike.World Premium Member you can see the Performance Score of each athlete on his profile page but also the PS of each of his performances. Soon you will also be able to see how the PS of every athlete develops over time on the athlete’s statistics on his profile page, also compared to the average PS in his age group or in his country – overall as well as for the two disciplines. This part is still in the making though.

You can also see the current PS of all athletes in the Aquabike.World Ranking.

If you are a premium member and you get a competition analysis of an upcoming race – or if you create a competition analysis yourself – you can now also see the athlete’s swim, bike and overall Performance Scores in the analysis and also get his predicted finish time which is calculated based on his Performance Scores.

 

More to come…

We are currently working on a whole load of other features where the Performance Score is used to compare athletes and events, to create lots of awesome statistics for each event, and even to create an individual and very detailed race report that every registered user will get after he completed an aquabike race. Stay tuned…