Throwing4: Phase-Aware Pose Modeling for Throw-Distance Prediction in Elite Athletics
Abstract: Elite athletics throwing provides a structured biomechanical action sequence together with an objective continuous outcome, namely throw distance, making it a suitable setting for performance-oriented sports analytics. In this work, we investigate whether explicit phase alignment of pose dynamics improves throw-distance prediction under realistic broadcast conditions. To support this study, we curate Throwing4, a dataset of 500 elite throwing clips spanning javelin, discus, hammer, and shot put, with corresponding two-dimensional pose sequences, frame-level phase annotations, and official distance labels. We formulate throw-distance prediction from broadcast-derived pose as a regression problem and compare full-sequence modeling against a phase-conditioned approach that partitions each attempt into four technique stages and fuses phase-specific motion representations. Experiments across multiple graph-based pose encoders show a consistent reduction in prediction error when phase structure is incorporated, indicating that phase-aligned modeling provides a more stable representation than treating the entire motion as an unstructured sequence. These findings suggest that explicit biomechanical phase information is a useful inductive prior for pose-based performance modeling in elite athletics throwing. Beyond score prediction, the dataset and protocol provide a basis for future work on fine-grained technique analysis, interpretable sports analytics, and robust modeling from broadcast video.