Originally published 17 Jan 2014 Embed from Getty Images After compiling the list of the fastest men’s and women’s all-round sprinters, I set about doing the same for jumpers. Well, ‘pole-less’ jumpers, as I’m not including the pole vault. Otherwise it would be a short list indeed. As was the case with the other lists, all of the points totals are based on the World Athletics scoring tables. Where appropriate, altitude marks have been included, as have indoor ...

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I have set about trying to compile a definitive list of both the men’s and women’s all-round sprinters. This is based solely on PBs and doesn’t take medals into consideration, so the fairest and most widely-accepted method of creating such a list is by using the World Athletics scoring tables, which assign a points value to athletics performances. A few things to note: Where electronically-timed PBs don’t exist for an athlete, I have included hand-timed performances, but ...

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  Building on the work done by Track and Field News with their list of the best all-round male sprinters (originally the top 100 but later reduced to 25), I’ve expanded it back up to 100 and, over the past few years, have tried to maintain and update it (with semi-regular frequency). I’ve also created an equivalent list for female sprinters. It was no small task, but credit must go to Justin Clouder for collating the original ...

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A month after Ashton Eaton broke the decathlon world record at the 2015 World Championships, I put together a blog post on the greatest (and completely imaginary) decathlon battle of all time. I didn’t anticipate having to update that post quite so soon, but Kevin Mayer only went and did the unthinkable, didn’t he?! His 9126 tally in Talence last weekend added 81 points to Eaton’s world record score, propelling him into all-time great status. Just a ...

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These are the top 20 debut marathons in history. Strictly speaking, some athletes listed below may have started previous marathons and failed to finish. But “fastest time achieved in the first marathon they completed” wasn’t really a catchy title, so I’m sticking with the word debut. Either way, I’ve marked such athletes with an asterisk. I’ve also included Moses Mosop’s time in the list, but only really for reference as it was set on Boston’s point-to-point ...

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