Tell me your date of birth, and I will tell you how good you are in orienteering

Alberto Ferriz-Valero ^1,2 Javier Montiel-Bontmatí ³ Ove Østerlie ^2,4* Juan Pedro Caraça-Valente ⁵ Alberto Mínguez-Viñambres ⁶ Héctor Esteve-Ibáñez ⁷

• ¹ Department of General Didactic and Specific Didactics, University of Alicante, Physical Education and Knowledge Advancement (PEAK) research group, Alicante, Spain
• ² Research group Digital Technology in Physical Education and Sport (DiTePES), Trondheim, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway
• ³ Department of General Didactic and Specific Didactics (University of Alicante), Alicante, Spain
• ⁴ Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
• ⁵ Department of Computer Languages ​​and Systems and Software Engineering, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• ⁶ Counsellor for Education, Science and Universities of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• ⁷ Faculty of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, Catholic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

Orienteering is a sport where participants must choose the best route between control points marked on the map, combining it with their displacement capacity. It combines endurance running with mental capacity. As in other sports, age can be a determinant in defining differences among youth runners. In this research, the hypothesis is that older orienteers will show better performance than younger orienteers within the same competitive group, for both girls and boys. Overall, official results of the XXXX (XXXX Federation of Orienteering) in long and middle-distance events, from 2005 to 2023, have been analyzed (sprint format events were excluded). Different categories from ten to twenty years of age for both sexes were included, and each category was divided into two years (1Y, 2Y) and two semesters (1S, 2S) within each year, creating four independent variables from the combination of year and semester (1Y1S, 1Y2S, 2Y1S, and 2Y2S). A total of 7,731 entries were examined, 4,318 were boys and 3,109 were girls. Descriptive statistics were analyzed for each variable, showing the mean and standard deviation. Normal distribution was confirmed for all variables (p > 0.05). Results showed a significant performance difference in favor of older orienteers in the youngest categories (U-10, M/F-12, M/F-14, and M-16), with these differences disappearing as age and performance increased (M/F-18 and M/F-20). These findings support the research hypothesis and align with other studies where age-related differences have also been found in other sports.