Decathlon

The decathlon is an athletic event consisting of ten track and field events. Events are held over two consecutive days and the winners are determined by the combined performance in all. Performance is judged on a points system in each event, not by the position achieved. The decathlon is contested by male athletes, while female athletes contest the heptathlon.

Traditionally, the title of "World's Greatest Athlete" has been given to the man who wins the decathlon. This began when King Gustav V of Sweden told Jim Thorpe, "You, sir, are the World's Greatest Athlete" after Thorpe won the decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912. The current holder of the title is American Bryan Clay, the gold medal winner of the event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, who took the title from Athens Olympics champion Roman Šebrle.

The word decathlon is of Greek origin (from δέκα deka [ten] and αθλος athlos).

Events

The modern event is a set combination of athletic disciplines, testing an individual’s speed, strength, skill, stamina, endurance, and perseverance; it includes five events on each of two successive days. The emphasis of the first day is on speed, explosive power, and jumping ability; the second emphasizes technique and endurance.

Day 1 • 100 meters • Long Jump • Shot Put • High Jump • 400 meters

Day 2 • 110 meter hurdles • Discus • Pole Vault • Javelin • 1500 meters

Origins

The event developed from the ancient pentathlon. Pentathlon competitions were held at the ancient Greek Olympics. Pentathlons involved five disciplines – long jump, discus throw, javelin, sprint and a wrestling match. Introduced in Olympia during 708 BC, the game was extremely popular for many centuries. By the sixth century BC, pentathlons had became part of religious games.

Gorgos, from Elis, a town near Olympia, was a four-time pentathlon winner during the period. Another key player was Lampis, a young Spartan who was the first Olympic winner. Automedes was also a known player of the time. The last recorded game winner was Publius Asklepiades of Corinth in AD 241. Roman Emperor Theodosius I officially put an end to the game in AD 393 by closing down all the sanctuaries including Olympia.

From the mid 1700s various versions of the competition emerged. The 1948 Olympics endorsed a new implication to the game. Seventeen-year-old Bob Mathias emerged as the then decathlon winner, banishing the myth that decathlon was a game for the old and the experienced. Mathias still remains the youngest decathlon sports champion in Olympic history.

Modern standardization

In 1964 the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF; now the International Association of Athletics Federations) laid out new scoring tables and brought about some standardization in the sport. The 1970s saw the game spreading to the Eastern European nations, mainly the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany.

The first decathlon competition was held on a single day, October 15, 1911, in Gothenburg, Sweden. This was technically not the first decathlon, but one of the first two, as Germany also held a decathlon on the very same day. The Germans contested their events in the same order but with a different scoring table. So, the first decathlon world-record holder was the winner of the first completed meet. Karl Hugo Wieslander, a Swede, and Karl Ritter von Halt, a German, were announced world-record holders.

The decathlon was added to the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. After experience, the following order was chosen: 100 m run, long jump, shot put, high jump, and 400 m run on the first day; 110 m hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, and 1500 m run on the 2nd day. The Swedes also developed a set of scoring tables, based on the 1908 Olympic records. After the 1912 Stockholm Games, the tables were updated to include many new Olympic records.

The 1912 Olympic decathlon has become legend because of the presence of Jim Thorpe. Thorpe had a terrific 1912 spring track season, winning as many as six events per meet. Thorpe made the U.S. Olympic team in four events: decathlon, pentathlon, high jump, and long jump. The Russian czar donated a Viking ship as a prize for the decathlon champion. Thorpe won the decathlon by almost 700 points over his closest opponent, Hugo Wieslander of Sweden. Because of the unexpected large number of entries, the decathlon was held over 3 days. The first day they held the 100 m run, long jump, and shot put. The second day consisted of the high jump, 400 m run, discus, and 110 m hurdles. The third and final day consisted of the pole vault, javelin, and 1500 m run. Thorpe’s 8412 points converts to 6564 points on the current tables, still a very respectable score three quarters of a century later. Swedes Wieslander, Charles Lomberg, and Gösta Holmér captured the next three spots.

Thorpe’s score was not beaten for another 15 years. In his absence, there was little decathlon activity for the remainder of the decade. Only in Sweden was the decathlon often contested. The Swedes managed to stay neutral during World War I, which forced the cancellation of the games of Berlin in 1916. Fascinatingly, decathlons were held as part of the Far Eastern Games in 1913, 1915, 1917, and 1919.

The average good decathlete competes at most three or four times a year, the less talented even fewer. Bill Toomey’s nine great efforts back in 1969 were very unusual. The decathlon is the Olympic event least commonly seen in non-Olympic meets.

The decathlete does not have to be amazing in all events to be a champion in the sport itself. But he must range from adequate in his weak events to good or better in the other skills. Because he must do well in the four runs and six field events, he has little opportunity to perfect any one event. A decathlete trying to improve performance in one specific event is likely to deteriorate in another, because the physical demands of the various events are conflicting. His training is necessarily different as he strives to improve all techniques, gain strength without losing speed, and acquire the stamina to perform through a competition that lasts anywhere from 4 to 12 hours per day during the Olympics. As a reference point, a performance in the (non-decathlon) world record class would give somewhere between 1100 and 1400 points per event, totaling over 12500 points for a full record-breaking decathlon. When compared to the 6-7000 points that a good decathlete would usually get, or the world record of slightly over 9000 points, this illustrates how much specialization must be sacrificed to become a good all-round athlete.

The decathlon is one of the few events with an arbitrary scoring system and thus the only one in which personal performance and records can be broken as new scoring tables are adopted. Under the original scoring tables adopted in 1912, Akilles Järvinen of Finland finished second in both the 1928 and 1932 Olympics, but the new scoring system introduced in 1934 gave Jarvinen higher converted totals than both the men he lost to. World-record holder C.K. Yang lost 1032 points when his 1963 performance was converted late in 1964 to the new tables first used in the 1964 Olympics. His top rivals lost only 287 and 172 points when their bests were converted, and Yang dropped from the favorite to third on the pre-Games ranking, finishing a disappointing fifth.

The arbitrary nature of the scoring tables can work in the opposite direction as well. In 1984, at the Los Angeles Olympic Games, Great Britain’s Daley Thompson missed the world record by one point on then-used 1962/77 tables. The tables were changed a year later and Thompson’s score in Los Angeles converted to a best-ever mark.

Points system

Points are given to the following formulae used by the IAAF:

• Points = INT(A*(B-P)C) for track events
• Points = INT(A*(P-B)C) for field events

A, B and C are parameters that vary by discipline, as shown in the table below, while P is the performance by the athlete in units given in the final column of the table.

Events	A	B	C	Units
100m	25.4347	18	1.81	seconds
Long Jump	0.14354	220	1.4	Centimetres
Shot Put	51.39	1.5	1.05	Metres
High Jump	0.8465	75	1.42	Centimetres
400m	1.53775	82	1.81	Seconds
110m Hurdles	5.74352	28.5	1.92	Seconds
Discus Throw	12.91	4	1.1	Metres
Pole Vault	.2797	100	1.35	Centimetres
Javelin Throw	10.14	7	1.08	Metres
1500m	0.03768	480	1.85	Seconds

Benchmarks

Split evenly between the events, the following table shows the benchmark levels needed to earn 1000, 900, 800, and 700 points in each sport.

Events	1000 pts	900 pts	800 pts	700 pts	Units
100m	10.395	10.827	11.278	11.756	seconds
Long Jump	776	736	694.1	651	Centimetres
Shot Put	18.4	16.79	15.16	13.53	Metres
High Jump	220.8	210.4	199.6	188.4	Centimetres
400m	46.17	48.19	50.32	52.58	Seconds
110m Hurdles	13.8	14.59	15.419	16.29	Seconds
Discus Throw	56.17	51.4	46.59	41.72	Metres
Pole Vault	528.7	496.5	463.4	429.2	Centimetres
Javelin Throw	77.19	70.67	64.09	57.45	Metres
1500m	233.79	247.42	261.77	276.96	Seconds

Using the most current world records, the present theoretical maximum score in the decathlon is 12,516.

Events	Record-holder	Record	Score
100m	Usain Bolt	9.96 seconds	1174
Long Jump	Mike Powell	895 centimetres	1312
Shot Put	Randy Barnes	23.12 metres	1295
High Jump	Javier Sotomayor	245 centimetres	1244
400m	Michael Johnson	43.18 seconds	1156
110m Hurdles	Dayron Robles	12.87 seconds	1126
Discus Throw	Jürgen Schult	74.08 metres	1383
Pole Vault	Sergey Bubka	614 centimetres	1277
Javelin Throw	Jan Železný	98.48 metres	1331
1500m	Hicham El Guerrouj	206 seconds	1218
		TOTAL	12516

Using the most current world decathlon bests, the present theoretical maximum score in the decathlon is 10,485.

Events	Record-holder	Record	Score
100m	Chris Huffins	10.22 seconds	1042
Long Jump	Erki Nool	822 centimetres	1117
Shot Put	Edy Hubacher	19.17 metres	1048
High Jump	Rolf Beilschmidt & Christian Schenk	227 centimetres	1061
400m	Bill Toomey	45.68 seconds	1025
110m Hurdles	Frank Busemann	13.47 seconds	1044
Discus Throw	Bryan Clay	55.47 metres	993
Pole Vault	Tim Lobinger	576 centimetres	1152
Javelin Throw	Peter Blank	79.80 metres	1040
1500m	Robert Baker	238.7 seconds	963
		TOTAL	10485

One hour decathlon

One hour decathlon is a special type of decathlon, in which the athletes have to start the last of ten events (1500 metres) within sixty minutes after the start of the first event. The world record holder is a Czech decathlete Robert Změlík, who achieved 7897 points at a meeting in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in 1992.