The Hamburg what?
Das Hamburg Zehntel is a 4km run in Hamburg, Germany for children in elementary school (Zehntel means one-tenth, which refers to the length being one tenth of a full marathon).
Analysis
Simulation
Fewer girls than boys
A peek at the age histogram reveals that there were more boys than girls in almost all age categories,
but the discrepancy is more pronounced in the 4th grade (ages 10-11).
In Germany, this is the age when children graduate from elementary school; could this be
an indication of increased pressure placed on boys to become more competitive?
Also noteworthy is that second graders were equally split this year.
The same trend holds for the previous two years as well:
Boys run faster, have more competition
The run time histograms show that boys were generally faster than girls – the higher number of older boys undoubtedly plays a role.
The distribution of runnning times among girls follows a symmetrical normal curve centered around 29 minutes (8.3 km/h or a fourth of the speed of a falling raindrop). The same distribution for boys, however, is skewed towards faster times, evidencing the aforementioned increased competitiveness (peaking at 24 minutes, or 10 km/h). Of the top 10 finalists, only one was a girl (7th place) and with the exception of one boy, all were 10 years or older.
In short, the proportion of fast boys was greater than the proportion of fast girls, and boys ran the Zehntel three minutes faster than girls.
Methodology
Data for this analysis was scraped from the Das Zehntel 2015 results page. Additional columns were added as follows
| Column name | Description |
|---|---|
| Gender | Inferred from download page, which had a separate list per gender |
| Disambiguated net run time | Run times were granular to the minute only, but ranking was correct (that is to say, although two children may have arrived within the same minute, the one whose ranking is higher would have run a little faster than the other). A proxy for the missing seconds data was artificially created by adding an incremental millisecond to each duplicate arrival time |
| Overall ranking | Boys and girls were ranked separately; using the Disambiguated Net Run Time, an overal ranking was inferred |
| Age group | A numerical substring ofr Age Group (Raw) that represents the approximate age of the children based on the year they entered school |
| Overall age group ranking | The ranking of students within their own age group irrespective of gender |
| Country | A substring of Name. That it represents a country is an assumption as nowhere is the meaning of the substring elucidated in the original table |