How do your reaction times stack up against world-class athletes?: A Data Study

The Start Gun is a unique data project that's putting an underrated aspect of a sprinters attributes into focus: their capability to react quickly under pressure.

The Start Gun is looking at how the average person’s reaction speeds stack up compared to the world’s top athletes. High-level athletes can regularly clock reaction times of under 0.15 seconds, with Florence Griffith Joyner’s incredible 0.131s reaction speed at the 1988 Seoul games standing as an almost unassailable speed.

But the start gun is more than just a quick bit of fun. The game will be using the data collected in an attempt to examine how age effects reaction time. It’s long been shown that the average university-aged person can achieve reaction speeds of about 0.19s, but a 2013 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning found that reaction speeds actually improve with age.

Data suggests that men’s reaction times continue to improve until their mid-30s, while women are able to reduce their reaction speeds into their 40s, and with the tight margins that exist to the 100m, that could be the difference of being first place or second, and perhaps explains why older sprinters sometimes have the edge over the over their younger counterparts.

Test your reaction times out here: https://www.unibet.com/brazil-2016/startgun