1 Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích, Pedagogická fakulta, Katedra tělesné výchovy a sportu 2 Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích, Pedagogická fakulta, Katedra matematiky ABSTRACT As a rule, performance capacity in sports constantly improves. Using statistical and expert analyses of time series, the authors examine changes in performance capacity in men's 5,000 meter run during 1945 -2016 and factors influencing on the development of performance capacity. Emil Zátopek was the

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... rst and strongest personality to succeed in this discipline. Data was acquired from athletic annuals and publications, and data related to the best performance of the leading fifty runners in each year were used. The shape of the performance curve is close to a parabola. The period after World War II saw the curve of performance follow a rapidly growing trend, which, however, decelerated during the mid-1950's until the mid-1970's. The latter marked a period of top performance, which was to end in the year 1989. Since then, performance has had a decreasing trend, and currently, the level of performance is the worst since 1953, according to some parameters since 1946. These changes in performance are probably partly caused by the level of State aid towards sports, social changes, development of training, and operation of sports centres as well as the option to participate in commercial contests outside the athletic track. Even though the talent support system abandoned in 1989 was partially renewed, performance capacity in men's 5,000 metre run presently fails to experience a long-term growth. We have determined a significant connection between performance of top runners and a large platform of runners in the Czech Republic, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between the 3 rd best performance of the year and the 50th performance of the year is r s = 0.908. It is debatable whether the current popularity of running will be reflected in this statistics in the future.