The Ultimate Sports Question GATORADEORPOWERADE

Introduction Athletes of all sizes compete every day in various sporting events. Ages range from young children to people nearing 100. Every athlete knows the importance of hydration, but over the past 30 years more emphasis has been placed on re- hydration. Now, every sport is sponsored by a different athletic drink. In our experiment, we decided to test whether Gatorade or Powerade was prefered.

Gatorade Gatorade was first created in 1965 for the University of Florida Gators football team. The original purpose was to keep the players hydrated during practices and games.

Gatorade Gatorade states, “Nothing rehydrates, replenishes and refuels better than Gatorade – not even water.” They also claim to stimulate thirst so athletes will drink more and stay better hydrated.

Powerade Powerade was made as a response to Pepsi buying Gatorade. Powerade claims to have a “great tasting flavor that encourages athletes to drink more.”

Gatorade vs. Powerade

Our Test Based on our experience as athletes, we think that Gatorade will be preferred by most athletes. We do not think that it will be a huge overwhelming decision. We think that around 60% of people will prefer Gatorade over Powerade.

Our Test To administer our test, we needed athletes, so we used all of the athletes that were present at Dartmouth Track and Field Practice on Friday, February, 13, We hoped to have 50 athletes for our test. Our test was double blind, with one pourer and one tester.

Procedure We bought 3 quarts of both Gatorade Lemon-Lime and Powerade Lemon-Lime. We poured 110 cups, half with Gatorade and half with Powerade, keeping them separate, each with about the same amount of liquid.

Procedure For each tester, we had one person, the pourer, place Powerade or Gatorade in the left or right hand of the transporter, noting their position on the data sheet. The transporter brought the cups to the front of the subject keeping them in the same hands. The cups were placed facing the subject, still in the same position.

Procedure The transporter asked the questions to the subject while the tasted the liquid. Question One: “Which of these two drinks tastes better, Left, Right or No Preference?”

Procedure After the transporter recorded the answers to the first question, another question was asked. “If you were replenishing your body after a workout, which drink would you choose: Left or Right?” The answer, left or right, was also brought back to the pourer and recorded.

Procedure The transporter walked back to the pourer, who on the data sheet wrote down the preference of the subject. This data was then copied from the data sheet onto a spreadsheet in Excel.

Null Hypothesis We decided that it would be equally likely that our subjects would prefer Gatorade or Powerade. This made our P(null) = 0.5 This is a normal distribution curve.

Null Hypothesis

Alternate Hypothesis

Critical Value To calculate our critical value, we used the formula z=( Pours – Pnull )/√( pnull(1-pnull)/n ) to find the z score and our null hypothesis. This gave us a value of 29.

Power The power of our experiment with 48 people was 31%. Our experiment was not too powerful from the beginning, we did not realize this, otherwise we could have changed several things.

Power Rethought We could have changed our alternate hypothesis. Had we selected 75% of people would choose Gatorade instead of 60%, we would have had a Power of 96%.

Power Rethought We also could have added in more test subject. If we had increased the number of subjects from 48 to 100 opinionated tasters, our Power would have also increased to approximately 54%.

Parameter As our test parameter, we decided that it would be equally likely for a subject to choose Gatorade or Powerade. This made our parameter 0.5.

Test Statistic With data collected from N randomly sampled athletes and G being the number of athletes who prefer Gatorade to Powerade, our test statistic is P=G=N: Under the Null hypothesis, G will be distributed through a binomial distribution with probability that pnull =0.5.

Results After conducting our test, we compiled our results and found that: 67% of our subjects like Gatorade. 32 out of 48 people prefered Gatorade to Powerade. 4 people were not opinionated tasters.

Tester Preferences

Results We had originally stated that we believe 60% of people would prefer Gatorade Our result of 67% is clearly higher than what we believed What does this mean?

Conclusions Our power could have been higher to give our project a higher power, but as chance would have it our experiment still worked out. As previously mentioned 67% of our test subjects preferred Gatorade, but how do we know for some strange reason that Dartmouth’s Track and Field team does not have a bias to pick Gatorade. Had time and resources permitted we could have tested a more diverse population of athletes or a random group of non athletes who have no reason to prefer one or the other.

Conclusions Also, we could include different sports drinks, like All-Sport, in our experiment to provide a more accurate depiction of what tastes better to athletes.

Thanks Dartmouth Track and Field Team Professor’s Leibon and Rudel