Thoughts & analysis
Best combined jumpers
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 […]
Fastest women’s combined sprinters
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 […]
Fastest men’s combined sprinters
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 […]
The greatest decathlon battle of all time – take two
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 […]
Fastest marathon debuts in history
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. […]
The greatest decathlon battle of all time
Imagine if the world’s five greatest all-round athletes in history lined up against each other in top form and competed in a decathlon. It would never happen, of course, because four of those decathletes are now retired. But it’s interesting to take their PB scores – all of which were world records at the time […]
Is 2015 the greatest ever year for sprinting?
According to the numbers, 2015 could possibly be the best year in history for the 100m. The table below lists the number of sub-10 and sub-11 performers in each of the past 20 years. It makes for fascinating reading. Already in 2015 there has been a flurry of fast times, leading to 10 men joining […]
100 fastest women’s 4x400m relay splits in history
Here are the top 100 women’s 4x400m relay splits, using information from Peter Larsson’s superb website, alltime-athletics.com. The columns are sortable, so you can rank them by time, name, country or relay leg. The top 100 men’s 4x400m relay splits are here.
100 fastest men’s 4x400m relay splits in history
Here are the top 100 men’s 4x400m relay splits, using information from Peter Larsson’s superb website, alltime-athletics.com. The columns are sortable, so you can rank them by time, name, country or relay leg. The top 100 women’s 4x400m relay splits are here.
The best combined eventers, combined
Occasionally I’ll 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 […]