Another century come and gone. Is it number 21 already?? What a century of Athletics it has been, too. Considering that the number of athletic records kept prior to 1900 is most likely miniscule, it seems appropriate to say that the 20th Century was the only century of Athletics so far.

These lists come a bit late in the game, what with the pre-2k innundation of "top" rankings, but nonetheless better late than never. As previously discussed, the Mercier Scoring Tables [1,2] are used as a statistical method of cross-event and gender-comparsion. So, it seems the natural thing to do is to compare the World Records, as they stood at the turn of the Clock, to determine who is the best Track and Field Athlete of all-time. That is, what is the World Record of Athletics?

Of course, before any number crunching is done, countless names spring to mind as to who might hold the crown. But, surprises are in store. Since the lists are not flawless, the statistical methodology not foolproof, but it's mostly an unbiased framework. We can only hope to trust these figures so far, but at the very least they'll provide some coffee-table discussions over the next little while.

Table 1 and Table 2 show the associated scores for the standing men's and women's World Records, as of January 2000. The listed events include only those officially recognized by the IAAF, although the Mile and 3000m are thrown in due to their strong presence in some key high performance competitions. Table 3 shows the overall rankings, from highest to lowest score. Ties are broken by considering the first decimal place (recall that scores are always rounded up, to ensure the maximum possible points are obtained). Surprisingly, all records considered are grouped between 988 and 1079 points, with an (unbiased) mean score of 1031, and a median of 1024. The standard deviation of the distribution is 26.04. The last three columns give the following information: the minimum performance required to achieve a ``maximum'' score of 1079, the mean performance (score of 1031), and the median performance (1024). The mean and median performances for men only are 1025.8 and 1022, while for women these values are respectively 1037.2 and 1037.5. This suggests that either the tables favor higher women's scores, or that women are generally better at their events than men!

Perhaps the most striking result of this comparison is the tie for top seed: the Women's Shot Put and the Heptathlon. Aparently, along with Natalya Lisovskaya, Jackie Joyner-Kersee really was the best athlete of all time! Performances commonly hailed as athletic feats of wonder (Florence Griffith-Joyner's and Michael Johnson's sprint dominating WRs, for example), rank not far behind, as does Mike Powell's long jump record: truly Beamonesque! Curiously, benchmarks such as MJ's 43.18s and Maurice Greene's (second-hand) 100m WR gain merely 1028 and 1015 points, respectively, with mean-score performances of 43.13s and 9.74s! In fact, note that for particular events, the mean/median performance are commensurate with the top world performances other than the WR (men's 200m, women's 100m and 200m, etc...).

The overall comparison also suggests certain weaknesses of the method, and help to indicate areas of improvement, either statistically (my problem) or athletically (theirs!). New events such as the women's Pole Vault may yet to have developed the performance rankings to make the scoring overly effective. The 110mH, men's marathon, women's Javelin, and women's Hammer Throw WRs are also curiously low-scoring. Granted, since the scoring tables are based on the weighted overall event rankings for the past 5 years, this may simply indicate a strength/weakness contrast in an event between consecutive years (i.e. some years may show stronger performances, and if these are weighted higher than others it can serve to skew the scoring).

It should be noted that the relay events (4x100m, 4x400m) are low, due to the fitting process. This is due to the fact that the 1st place rank for a particular year is assigned the equivalnent score as the 5th place avgerage for other events (due to the general lack of world-class relay performances in a given year). It could be arugued that since a relay is a team effort, the associated score should not be as high as for an individual event.

References:
[1] J. R. Mureika, D. Covington, and D. Mercier, "The 1999 Mercier Scoring Tables: A How-To Guide" (submitted to Athletics: Canada's National Track and Field / Running Magazine)
[2] J. R. Mureika, D. Covington, and D. Mercier, "The 1999 Mercier Scoring Tables", Official Athletics Canada release (in press)