Richard Crawford

Hi Lother and Gunther,

Thanky you for reading and commenting on my article. I found it interesting that you both presented examples of why the fairness of the scoring tables is still questioned, although that may not have been the reason for your comments.

As long as we have only qualitative definitions of "fairness", we are limited to exchanging opinions, with no way to determine if our opinions are valid. This can be great fun over a beer or two, but enjoyable as that is, iit is not very helpful. Instead, I proposed a quantitative definition of "fairness", applied it to my dataset, and analyzed the results (which were not what I expected).

Other definitions of "fairness" are possible, of course; I'd like to hear about them.

Regards,

Richard

There are several topics already in this subforum (for example, see Gunther Sonnemann's 2018 posting about Kevin Mayer or Janek Salmistu's 2016 posting about the 538 article). Since I have a large dataset (introduced in my posting several days ago), several years ago I used it to take look at the question of the tables' fairness for myself.

The result is an unpublished article. The main conclusion is that some events do seem to be rewarded more than others, but not necessarily the ones you might expect.

If anyone is interested in seeing the article, send me an email at decarcc@gmail.com and I'll be glad to send you a copy.

I began building databases of decathlon and heptathlon performances since 2002. I have applied only one filter -- adult hurdles and implements. I include everything I can find on the Internet, in books, newspapers, magazines, or anywhere else. So far, I have well over 90,000 entries in each database, representing about 30,000 athletes of each gender and covering the years 1988 to the present.

There are some major holes in the databases, of course. I have essentially no data from mainland China. Women's data before about the year 2000 is much harder to find than men's (thanks to Decathlon 2000!!). I have complete results of the decathlon at 1994 European Cup 2nd League meeting in Copenhagen, but nothing whatsoever for the heptathlon.

Do any of you have your own collections of data? I'm more than willing to share notes and data.

Dick Crawford
Culver City, California, USA