Sports Growth: How to Analyze and Predict Next years
The Global Powerlifting Community
Data Sources for Powerlifting
This page uses data from the OpenPowerlifting project, https://www.openpowerlifting.org. You may download a copy of the data at https://data.openpowerlifting.org.
OpenPowerlifting is a community service project to create a permanent, open archive of the world’s powerlifting data.
I would like to thank all contributors for this project and would encourage any reader to help with their project. If you would like to support their effort, please consider donating to the project.
All competition data available on this website are contributed to the Public Domain.
The main source for the analysis of this series is the Open Powerlifting. In case a different source of data is used, it will be presented.
Short-term impacts, long-trem opportunities
Powerlifting is growing, but what is driving it?Analyzing and visualizing historical data will help us understand how fast it is growing and the main reasons for that. Future is uncertain, COVID taught us the hardest way, but what is expected for the sport growth after it and can we do something about it?
How is the sport growing and why is it?
Generally, the number of lifters competing each year is a good indicator of how much the sport is growing. We notice this number was growing fast since 2010, peaking at 2019 with 262,367 lifters competing worldwide, right before COVID-19’s lockdown.
The main driver for this number was the female presence on the sport. Even tough the male participation was almost two times higher, female participation has been growing in a much faster pace than male since 2015.
What happened in 2019?
The number of female lifters per country is an indicator that helps us answer where this growth is coming from. From the 2019 competitions, we notice that the USA is the main reason this presence is increasing.
In fact, the female growth per country trend is clear happening on all the countries. USA, Russia and Ukraine started growing earlier them most countries and in 2013, the first two had almost the same amount of female lifters competing, 21,253 vs. 18,846 respectively.
Not only the growth was driven by USA female lifters but also by Raw competitions. In fact, since 2013 the amount of female lifters competing raw events increased a lot.
To get a better picture, the average age of the USA female liters competing is decreasing since 2010. This indicator shows us that either more young lifters are joining the sport or older lifters are quitting it. Since the overall number of lifters is increasing, I believe it is the former.
However, the average age does not give us the full picture. As we know, the minimum age for competing is 14 and there is technically no maximum. The age distribution for 2019 competitions shows the curve is skewed to the left, with the most common age being 22.
What can we expect for the next years?
Until COVID-19, the sport was growing fast and steady, will this event impact next years or was it just hiccup?
In order to evaluate our model, we compare predictions for the next ten years using data up to 2021 (which is the last year with complete data), and compare it to what is happening in right now.
The prediction for 2022 gives us a maximum (Hi 95) of 133,605 lifters and, so far, already 134,624 lifters have competed. Thus, we believe COVID was just an outlier and it should not be taken in consideration while predicting next years.
Now, if we were to predict next ten years using data up to 2019, things seems too optimistic. Back in 2019, I would say it is totally reasonable to find this numbers, but comparing those numbers to nowadays, this seems impossible. But, as the old saying goes:
It is easy to predict the past.
The chart shows that growth keeps positive but also shows that it is slowing down. The lowest forecast (Lo 95) for 2022 predicts 270,160, this number is almost twice the number of lifters how already competed this year and there is only a quarter left, maybe we miss it by 25% (I’ve seem worst predictions).
Conclusion
The sport is growing fast, numbers don’t lie. By digging into it, we can find a few answers to how and why this is happening:
- Female athletes presence is driving it even faster.
- This is a worldwide trend but USA growth was much faster.
- Raw events is helping the sport grow, probably because it has a lower entry barrier.
- The average age of female lifters is decreasing and the distribution shows it is skewed.
By analyzing data, we notice that COVID-19 impact was an outlier and we should expect it not to reduce growth speed as much on the short-term.
On the long-term, based on the analysis, my recommendation for federations, coaches and influencers worldwide that want to help the sport to grow, is to engage female lifters to join the sport. Specifically, the main opportunity is to promote raw powerlifting events.
Furthermore, since data showed that the majority of them age around 23, social media like Instagram, Tik Tok, seems to be a good way to communicate with this public.
Are you experiencing more female participation on the sport?
Female lifters, what was the biggest barrier to start competing powerlifting?
I would love to hear from you!
