RELATIVE AGE EFFECT IN BRAZILIAN ARTISTIC AND RHYTHMIC GYMNASTS PARTICIPATING IN OLYMPIC GAMES BETWEEN 1980 AND 2020

Like most individual Olympic sports in Brazil, gymnastics uses the practitioner's year of birth to group them into different competition and/or training categories. In this way, athletes born at the beginning of the year compete with athletes born at the end of the year. However, this model loses sensitivity to Relative Age Effects (RAE), defined as a consequence of the age difference between athletes of the same age category, which occurs because of the division of sporting categories of a certain sport based on the chronological age of its practitioners (Werneck, 2017). The presence of RAEs has been studied in Brazil, and has been verified in individual and collective sports, and at different sporting levels, from school sports to high performance. Such studies reinforce the idea that the RAE is a relevant parameter for a better understanding of athlete development processes, especially regarding the organization of sports modalities at different levels, thinking about a better way to develop sports and, thus, to provide a greater number of athletes with conditions to reach the highest sporting performance possible. Thus, the objective of this study was to analyze the RAE of Brazilian Olympic gymnasts in Womens Artistic Gymnastics (WAG), Mens Artistic Gymnastics (MAG) and Rhythmic Gymnastics (RG). This descriptive quantitative research analyzed data from 58 gymnasts (46 women and 12 men), Brazilians, 12 from MAG, 17 from WAG and 29 from RG, who participated in Olympic Games since the 1980 Moscow edition until the most recent edition, in Tokyo, 2020. The data related to their dates of birth were obtained by searching for the gymnasts' names on the Olympedia website. To analyze the dates of birth, the model of categorizing the year by quartiles (January/March, April/June, July/September, and October/December) was applied. In general, a majority of athletes were born in the first part of the year (55%), and the second quartile - which includes the months of April, May and June - had the highest percentage among the quartiles analyzed (31%), corroborating some variables analyzed in international studies on this theme. For MAG, a reverse RAE was observed, with the majority of athletes born in the second half of the year (67%). For the WAG and the RG, the RAE was present, both for the quartile division and for the halves of the year. It seemed to us that there is an institutional influence related to maturation development for the existence of such an effect, since for international adult competitions, the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique considers that an athlete in either WAG or RG can compete in the year in which he/she turns 16, differently from the MAG in which the athlete can compete in the year in which he turns 18, and the main championships of the sport commonly take place in the second half of the year, demanding from the athlete the longest possible preparation time for a good performance in this type of event. We conclude that the data identified in this research allows a broader look at the modalities analyzed and a potential factor linked to international sports success, guiding entities responsible for the development of gymnastics modalities, in order to enhance them for a better development in different spheres.