This got posted at R-bloggers last night, after the men’s 100 meter Olympic event was over. Marcus Gesmann predicted Usain Bolt’s 9.63 second result within 0.05 seconds. Even better, he did it using a simple log-linear model that didn’t control for any other factors.
Check the original article at R-bloggers, which talks more about the progression of faster running times and includes the R code used.