Thoughts & analysis
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. […]
My spectator PBs
The thought of making note of my spectator PBs hadn’t even crossed my mind until I came across a discussion on the subject on an internet message board. It has since become a mild obsession. Like all fans, I love witnessing a world record being broken. But I now get almost as much satisfaction in […]
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 […]
Combined events and the 400m hurdles – the unlikely couple
Back in October, decathlon world record-holder Ashton Eaton announced that he’s going to give the 400m hurdles a try this summer. And so began the speculation about how fast he can run over the barriers around one lap of the track. This week he said that he is aiming for somewhere between 47 and 48 […]