Abstract

This article presents the results of a study whose fundamental research problem boils down to the question: what are the individual achievements of older people in sports bridge in Poland to younger people? The study used analysis of documents recording the results of bridge competitions. In the elaboration of the data, the methods of inductive statistics were applied, the most important of which was the Student’s t-test comparing means for independent groups. It was used for comparative analysis of the results obtained by people aged 60 and over with younger people and people aged 70 and over with younger people. Four different levels of comparison were used. In three of them, the recorded achievements of older and younger people came from the same occupations, i.e., they involved direct competition. In these, the achievements of older people were found to be either slightly lower or the same as those of younger people. The fourth indicator concerned the total achievements throughout the year, and here it was shown that the achievements of older people are significantly lower than those of younger competitors. On this basis, conclusions went beyond purely sporting competition and related to certain universal features of psychosocial functioning. It was concluded that bridge achievements might be a premise for building hypotheses about such competencies as problem-solving ability, memory efficiency, communication skills, or logical thinking, but also a social activity. Thus, the obtained results confirmed most scientific reports concerning these qualities. These competencies are only slightly lower or the same in the older population as in the younger. On the other hand, a lower total annual performance index can probably be explained by a lower intensity of participation in sports competitions.