Statistics

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 […]

Best combined jumpers

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, […]

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. […]

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 […]

The best combined eventers, combined

  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 […]

My spectator PBs

Following on from my recent athletics bucket list, I’m continuing with the theme of “lists that all athletics fanatics should keep” with my set of spectator PBs. In other words, the best athletics performances that I have witnessed in person. The thought of making note of my spectator PBs hadn’t even crossed my mind until […]

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.

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.

Chronological list of the sub-10 club

  When Adam Gemili clocked 9.97 in the 100m in Birmingham last weekend, there was some confusion over whether or not he became the 100th member of the sub-10-second club. Some stats sites listed him as the 102nd member, others the 100th, the 101st, the 103rd. You get the picture. It’s exactly the kind of […]

Chronological list of the sub-11 club

  I’m a stickler for equality. So following my list of the chronological entries into the sub-10-second club for the 100m, I had to do the same for the women; this time using 11 seconds as the benchmark. To date, 84 women have achieved the feat. As was the case with the men’s, there were […]