Dodgy, or Just Awesome?

Olympic 200m champion Veronica Campbell-Brown had some interesting words to say recently on the subject of female athletics world records.

She said: "The men enjoy all the glamour because they're capable of breaking world records. Women don't have that luxury."

It’s an interesting point. Here are the current women’s track and field world records, with the date set, and time the record has stood:

100m: 10.49; 1988 (20 years)
200m: 21.34; 1988 (20 years)
400m: 47.60; 1985 (23 years)
800m: 1:53.28; 1983 (25 years)
1,500m: 3:50.46; 1993 (15 years)
5,000m: 14:11.15; 2008 (< 1 year)
10,000m: 29:31.78; 1993 (15 years)
3,000m steeplechase: 8:58.81; 2008 (< 1 year)
100m hurdles: 12.21; 1988 (20 years)
400m hurdles: 52.34; 2003 (5 years)
High jump: 2.09m; 1987 (21 years)
Pole vault: 5.05m; 2008 (< 1 year)
Long jump: 7.52m; 1988 (20 years)
Triple jump: 15.50m; 1995 (13 years)
Shot put: 22.63m; 1987 (21 years)
Discus: 76.80m; 1988 (20 years)
Hammer throw: 77.80m; 2006 (2 years)
[Although, according to Wiki, the person who set this mark is currently serving a suspension, and has had a further world record (78.61m) disqualified.]
Javelin: 72.28m; 2008 (< 1 year)
[This record relates to the new specification of the javelin following the 1999 change in the center of gravity – the previous record under the old specification (80.00m) was set 20 years ago in 1988.]
Heptathlon: 7,291 points; 1988 (20 years)
4x100m relay: 41.37; 1985 (23 years)
4x400m relay: 3:15.17; 1988 (20 years)

Of the more recent of these records, three (5,000m, 3,000m steeplechase, and Pole Vault) are in events that have only relatively recently become part of the women’s programme, and another (400m hurdles) has been an Olympic event only since 1984. The world records in the vast majority of the long-standing Olympic events have stood for over two decades, and in most cases have never really been threatened. Campbell-Brown is a double Olympic champion at the 200m, yet her personal best at the distance is 21.74, over a third of second (an age in sprinting terms) slower than a 20-year-old world record

By contrast, only the discus and hammer records have stood since the 1980s in the men’s events, and eight records have been set this century (four of them this year).

What in the merry blazes is going on?

Given the revelations about doping that followed the collapse of the former East Germany, there have occasionally been calls for certain world records to be “reset”, or for there to be a some sort of additional secondary world record, though it is difficult to see how this would work (even though some of the doubts, it must be admitted, are not entirely without foundation) especially since far from all of these records are held by athletes from the former GDR, and to retrospectively cast doubts on the achievements of competitors who never failed a drugs test, doesn’t seem, well, particularly sporting. (The closest athletics has yet come to anything like this is for completely different reasons: due to questions over the wind speed reading, the 100m record is now annotated by the Association of Track and Field Statisticians as: "probably strongly wind-assisted, but recognised as a world record".)

In any case, though, are these records necessarily dodgy? Might there instead have been an unprecedented flourishing of talent in the 80s? It is not without precedent for records to stand for this long. To pick the achievements of just two stout and unimpeachable servants of athletics from my own corner of the world, Sebastian Coe’s quite remarkable 1981 world record for the 800m stood for 16 years, and to this day only one person has ever run faster, and Kathy Cook retired from athletics in 1986, and still holds the UK records for the 200m and 400m.

To switch sports, Don Bradman played Test cricket between 1928 and 1948, averaging 99.94. The next best (for a minimum of 20 innings) is Mike Hussey’s much inferior (relatively) 70.60, and he has currently only played half as many matches as the Don did…

(Of course, there is more than just talent going on. Though the Don played before advances in bat design, covered pitches, and so on, he also played before advances in preparation, and the availability of video footage of players’ entire careers to base bowling plans and field placing strategies on.)

Still, sometimes people are just ahead of their time, or quite absurdly outside the norm (in all sorts of fields, not just sport) – and with the amount of sport that goes on nowadays, might we expect to sometimes come across these once in a generation or once in a lifetime talents that mere mortals take years or decades to catch up to?

I suspect many will (quite possibly rightly) suggest I’m being a bit naïve, and a hopeless sporting romantic here (O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago! &c.) and I have to say, I’ve been as disappointed as anyone at the doping scandals in various sports that have surfaced in recent years; and yet, I really like sport, and, in my rosier (or rose-tinted) moments, I still think it’s sometimes nice to cling to the hope that it may not be quite as broken as it often seems to be...