Richard Crawford

The 2001 edition of "IAAF Scoring Tables for Combined Events" includes the nine "guiding principles" that were used (or at least inspired) the 1984 tables currently in use. One of these is directly addressed by Mr. Snoch's articles and also by my own article from 2018 ("Are the Decathlon Tables Fair?") This is #2: "Results in various events should ... yield about the same number of points if the results are comparable as to quality and difficulty." Snoch also addresses #8: "It is desirable ... that the total scores using the new tables for the top world class athletes should remain approximately the same." (I think that his is a result of his methodology rather than an explicit goal.) But there is one principle which has been ignored -- #4: "It must be possible to use the scoring tables for beginners, juniors and top athletes." (How to apply this is quite unclear. It does not suggest, for example, how to accommodate the different hurdle heights or race lengths between juniors and seniors, much less implement weights.) It seems to me that basing the results exclusively on the upper levels of achievement skews them substantially. My article attempts to look at how well #2 is met at all performance levels, although it explicitly excludes data from non-senior performances. It asks whether an athlete who improves from one percentile to another is awarded with the same additional number of points regardless of the event. I have the advantage (perhaps dubious) of a database of about 100,000 usable (that is, with ten non-zero event scores) decathlon performances to work with, which allows me to subdivide them into various groups without losing too much statistical significance. This subdivision allows me to compare an athlete with others of comparable levels of achievement. But I made no attempt to propose modifications to the tables in use, much new tables altogether.