More than a decade ago, I purchased the domain runjumpthrow.com. I didn’t have any real plan for it at the time, but I thought that it would be a desirable web address to have if ever I had an athletics-related Eureka moment. I’ve had a couple of ideas for it since then, but nothing that I felt was truly worth pursuing. So instead of forking out more money to renew it for another 10 years, I’ve ...
Twitter is dangerous. Occasionally I see a tweet which triggers my inner geek to create a random athletics-related list. A few months back, fellow stats dude Hilary Evans tweeted about Russian heptathlete Tatyana Chernova’s recent wedding to decathlete Vitaliy Smirnov. So of course, I had to create a list of the best husband-wife combined eventers in history. And here it is… The table below ranks the couples in two ways – by the combined total of their PBs, ...
#2694509 / gettyimages.com Sixty years ago today, Roger Bannister became the first man to run faster than four minutes for the mile. Yes, it was great (as all world records are). But why is it still celebrated six decades later when there are countless other athletics performances that are far superior? I wish I knew. I’ve blogged about this before, but no one has yet been able to give me a good answer. I’m not going to go ...
Anyone who follows my @Statman_Jon account on twitter will know that I like to tweet about athletics. A lot. The vast majority of my timeline is made up of athletes or people tweeting about athletics. I follow more than 500 twitter accounts and I enjoy all of them (naturally; otherwise I wouldn’t follow them). I tend not to follow athletes who tweet inane things like: “baking a banana cake!” Similarly, I don’t follow people who take six ...
More than anyone, I know what it’s like to get wrapped up in the numbers of track and field. It is a numbers-based sport after all; athletes are timed against the clock or measured against the tape, opening up a realm of sporting statistics. It’s easy to forget about the stories behind some of the incredible people involved in this sport. Of course, any athlete who reaches world-class level is amazing for that reason alone. But ...
