A New Year’s Proposal for a New Era of Athletics Recordkeeping
As we enter the second year of the 2020s (and the first year of the decade that will hopefully have something resembling the normal competition schedule), now seems as good a time as any to reevaluate recordkeeping conventions in Athletics.
The sport of Athletics has changed in major ways in recent years. Most publicly visible among them is that most major brands now have new, superior shoes that help long-distance runners achieve performances they couldn’t have achieved under earlier era’s conditions. While these shoes created a jarring and drastic leap in performance in distance running events, we shouldn’t let limitations of memory blind us to the fact that quantum changes of all kinds — in technology, in technique, in training — have taken place across various events and eras: improvements in pole vault poles, changes to the javelin for safety but to the detriment of its flight, switching from cinder tracks to all-weather, the invention of the Fosbury Flop, unfettered abuse of anabolic steroids and EPO, and the growth in effectiveness — in fits and starts, admittedly — of the global anti-doping movement are just a few.
And yet Athletics and its followers still maintain a laser-like focus on all-time World Records, set under the wildly varied conditions of different eras. Oftentimes races or events are billed as World Record attempts and then viewed as failures if they fall short, diminishing these performances that were truly extraordinary despite not being record-setting. This records-only framework sells short the singular performances of the past — erasing them from our memories along with the record books when they’re eclipsed by a modern performance — and exceptional non-record breaking performances by today’s athletes alike.
And a certain circle of fossilized tastemakers in the sport isn’t even satisfied when today’s athletes do succeed in unleashing record-setting performances, instead choosing to rant against supershoes, pacemakers, or the better sports science of today, publicly longing for the good old days of cinder tracks, amateurism, and training by walking to school every day uphill both ways in a driving blizzard with nothing but shards of glass on the soles of their feet.
As such, to better contextualize and celebrate exceptional performances of all eras, and for the good of the sport, Athletics institutions should start keeping and commentators start using a “Best of Era” framework when trying to contextualize how exceptional a performance is, comparing performances primarily to others achieved in the broadly similar contemporary competitive context. This change alone won’t change some people’s record-fixation, but beginning to use this Best of Era framework would be a substantial step toward getting all of us in this great sport to better-value performances from the sport’s past and also better-enjoy the feats of today, while inviting potential fans to join us in appreciating all the threads in the rich tapestry of a hopefully ever-growing global Athletics community (and helping to keep it from, as it at times threatens to do, unraveling).
We need to start by defining what is meant by “Best of Era” framework. Even more specifically, how should we define a term as amorphous as “era?” In a sport defined by the Olympics, its eras are already informally determined by quadrenniums, so for Best of Era-purposes we would at all times be formally considered to be in the Modern Era, consisting of both the current and the previous quadrennium (with the quadrennium considered to end on December 31 of the Olympic year — not upon extinguishing of the torch — to keep from splitting performances achieved within the same season between eras)¹. Barring exceptional circumstances, all officials, announcers, media members, and fans of the sport will, when referring to a performance’s rank, refer to its place on the Modern Era List rather than the All-Eras List.²
For purposes of posterity, all performances will be considered a part of two named eras (named after the host-cities of the Olympic Games contained within them): the historical record would consider a 12.97 110m Hurdles by me today (January 2, 2021) both a part of the Rio-Tokyo Era³ (and be contemporaneously referred to as the t8th-best performance, and me the 6th-best 110m Hurdles performer, of the Modern Era) and the Tokyo-Paris Era⁴ (currently t5th performance, 3rd performer, although this list wouldn’t be referred to until the previous era’s end).
The inclusion of two quadrenniums in each era serves two purposes: First, so that there is a deep, established base of comparison when a list comes into use on January 1 of a post-Olympic year (and there isn’t a ridiculous rush of list-topping performances, like when some solid but unremarkable All-Big 10-level runner is the world leader in the mile in January). And second, so that when comparing athletes’ championship greatness within and across eras, there is a larger sample of top-level championships included within each era to better assess achievement within that era (two Olympics and — at least since the Seoul-Barcelona Era — four World Championships).
This system of directly comparing only among contemporary competitors is the premise of modern, analytics-based statistics like WAR in baseball and PER in basketball, which allow for more precise evaluation of athletes’ performances, but only as relates to contemporaneous competitors. Is Sanya Richards Ross a better Women’s 400m performer than her contemporaries in the Athens-Beijing and Beijing-London eras? Her dual-era-topping 48.70 at the IAAF World Cup in Athens on September 16, 2006 (in combination with her record in the era’s championships and multiple other performances near the top of those Best of Era lists) emphatically suggests yes.
But was she better than Marita Koch, who ran a Moscow-Los Angeles and Los Angeles-Seoul-topping (as well as All-Eras List-topping) 47.60 in 1985 and has her own haul of global and international golds? When using the All-Eras List as a primary measure, definitely not — the 1.1 seconds and seventeen-place difference (first for Koch, eighteenth for Richards Ross) of their top performances on the All-Eras Performance List between their bests seemingly form an unbridgeable chasm. But when acknowledging them both as the defining athletes of their respective eras in the event, we then get to take into consideration the environment of those eras when considering their times and accolades, and wonder whether some factor unrelated to individual greatness contributed to twelve of the sixteen performances between their bests being posted in the eras in which Koch competed and Richards Ross didn’t⁵. How much that matters is a question that can’t be answered objectively. But by divorcing the discussion from the ersatz authority of the All-Eras list, we’re able to better appreciate both great performers from both eras without reducing them solely to a single number on a stopwatch (that doesn’t tell anywhere near the whole story).
The use of Best of Era Lists isn’t intended to eliminate All-Eras Lists or All-Eras Bests entirely, but is intended to supplant them as the primary ordinal metric by which we assess the exceptionality of a performance. Who is to say whether any specific Men’s 5,000m performance of the Sydney-Athens Era, when EPO use was outlawed but largely unpoliced, was illegally aided? But should Dejen Gebremeskel’s breathtaking London-Rio Era List-topping 12:46.81 run in July of 2012 in Paris be primarily compared against an All-Eras List including many performances from eras with more lax anti-doping enforcement (on which it ranks a nondescript 14th-best performance of all-time, and Gebremeskel the 9th-best performer), or primarily against contemporaneous performances conducted under the (somewhat) better antidoping protocols of the 2010s? And it is obvious, to the point that some are screaming that the sport is broken, that no performance from the pre-Pebax and carbon fiber days should have as its primary point of comparison times run in supershoes like the Nike ZoomX Dragonfly Spikes that Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei wore when shattering Kenenisa Bekele’s 5,000m World Record in August of this year.
Athletics as an institution already accepts in its recordkeeping that micro-level factors specific to a race affect performance: this is why sprint records are required to be set only in races with a wind reading of 2.0 meters/second or less, or why separate event records are kept for the notoriously hilly TCS New York City Marathon and the flat, record-friendly route used by the BMW Berlin Marathon. These criteria and lists help us to better understand and appreciate how incredible Geoffrey Mutai’s 2:05:05 course record run in New York is (or how much less exceptional Obadele Thompson’s gail-aided 9.69 100m run in El Paso, Texas in April of 1996 is than it may initially appear).
The introduction of Best of Era Lists does the same for macro-level factors — like improvements or gaps in the anti-doping regime; norms around human or technological pacemaking; training or technique breakthroughs; or huge technological advances in implements, running surfaces, or footwear⁶. It gives us the framework to see, for example, Croatian discus sensation Sandra Perkovic’s 69.11m gold medal-winning throw in London, 71.08m mark from 2014 in Switzerland, and 71.41m toss in July of 2017 (again in Switzerland) not just as throws buried behind dozens of Soviet Bloc marks from the ’80s⁷, but as the furthest throws of the Beijing-London, London-Rio, and Modern Eras, respectively. This era-spanning dominance clearly establishes Perkovic as one of the giants of her event (as does her slew of World and Olympic golds and various other international titles and medals), and paired with her lack of a high All-Eras List ranking, strongly suggests that there are macro-level factors inhibiting more-recent Women’s Discus performance. And that those macro-level factors have kept Perkovic from not just threatening relative flash-in-the-pan East German Gabrielle Gabriele Reinsch’s 76.80m All-Eras Best but even posting a mark that would appear in the Seoul-Barcelona Era top-50⁸ in no way diminishes her greatness. If anything, it suggests she may have thrown a 77m-plus All-Eras Best in the macro-environment of that era. (Not that this can be determined definitively . . . which, if you haven’t noticed, is kind of the point.)
And Best of Era lists don’t just burnish the credentials of modern athletes operating under a (somewhat) more rigid anti-doping regime or with recalibrated implements. They also serve to remind us of the greatness of athletes whose peaks took place in bygone eras. As a distance runner from Maine, I am 100% convinced that Joan Benoit Samuleson is the greatest American marathoner of all-time, male or female⁹, and while her erstwhile American All-Eras Best 2:21:21 in Chicago in 1985 was recently displaced to third on that list by ASICS super shoe prototype-wearing Sara Hall, it remains the second-best on both the the Los Angeles-Seoul and Seoul-Barcelona lists (global editions), and her 2:22:43 Boston win in 1983 remains atop the Moscow-Los Angeles Era List (also global) by an impressive minute and forty-three seconds. That’s right: over that eight year period there was no other women’s marathoner in the world who would have even been within a quarter-mile while Samuelson was breaking the tape in her best performance. And if you want to argue that that (along with her Olympic gold medal) doesn’t make Samuleson the greatest American marathoner of all-time, you’re wrong — but you can find me at McGreevy’s on Marathon Monday and buy me a beer and argue with me about it.
And that’s the point of these Best of Era lists: not to use them to definitively determine who the best Women’s 400m hurdler of all-time is — their very premise is based upon the fact that objective cross-era comparisons are impossible — but to give us a tool that lets us argue about it, and to enjoy the sport in the process. Too often too many Athletics stalwarts hold all athletes up to some allegedly-objective World Record standard, or some allegedly objective “purity of sport” standard — both of which are in actuality impacted by factors both micro- and macro- outside of an athlete’s control — and use that standard as a bludgeon to diminish any performance that falls short, be it present day or historical.
In Athletics, we have an impressive historical record — it includes long jumps from the 1930s measured to the centimeter and contemporary four-hour race walk events timed to the second — but no mark tells the full story of its own accomplishment, be it a modern All-Eras Best set with wavelight pacing in a set-up race or Jessie Owens setting or tying four All-Era Bests in 45 minutes. And it doesn’t serve the sport — or increase our enjoyment of it or a potential fan’s interest in it — to treat any one of those accomplishments as a falsely-objective bar by which all other performances must be measured (and diminished in comparison to).
Adopting the Best of Era Lists-framework doesn’t solve this problem in and of itself — Athletics as an institution has some deep-seated problems that no single tweak can solve — but it is one easy change we can take to bring our sport into the modern era — or, as we’ll now call it, the Modern Era — while still appropriately venerating its past. Because as the world has changed, Athletics has — sometimes despite itself — changed alongside it. And to acknowledge that, we need to consider performances from the different eras of our sport differently, and begin thinking about Athletics’ performances from both the golden past and the shining present (and, indeed, the entire sport itself) in a more modern, context-dependent fashion. And bringing Best of Era lists to a position of primacy in our present-day Athletics discourse is a small way we can begin to shift Athletics’ mindset to do just that.
¹ The current “Modern Era” would thus span from January 1, 2013-December 31, 2021. Yes, I propose we adjust the length of the current Modern Era to account for the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics. The idea that we would try to rigidly standardize eras’ lengths when the Best of Era framework is an attempt to account for the fact that the context of Athletics competition is impossible to rigidly standardize would be an absurd irony.
² As the deemphasized All-Time lists will be rebranded, with World Records becoming All-Eras Bests.
³ Which is what the current Modern Era would be known as once we are no longer in it.
⁴ January 1, 2017-December 31, 2024.
⁵ In this case, it was obviously the state-sponsored doping regimes that many Soviet Bloc athletes (sometimes unwittingly) participated in. And while there is already broad awareness of this specific macro-level factor, this sort of era-adjusting has value even and perhaps especially between eras with seemingly unequal performances within an event where the cause of the disparity is unclear.
⁶ Yes, some events have taken quantum leaps forward or back within an era. But with Athletics’ highly knowledgeable commentariat I feel confident that, say, the distance-reducing changes to the Women’s Javelin implement made at the end of Atlanta-Sydney Era and more substantially impacting the Sydney-Athens Era list will not go unremarked and will lead to many great arguments at Eugene, Oregon’s Wild Duck Cafe. Barguments are fun, and there’s no need to overcomplicate our joyfully simple sport by dividing different events’ eras in bespoke fashion.
⁷ The best of these marks, the 71.41m, is seventieth (yes, you read that right: 70th) All-Eras (and ranks Perkovic only the fifteenth-best All-Eras performer, which is patently absurd).
⁸ Perkovic’s 71.41m throw would’ve only been the fifty-sixth-best throw of this era with its unfettered steroid usage — and Perkovic has served a doping suspension herself! Only 15 of the top 70 All-Eras throws aren’t from this era . . . steroids without any testing are a helluva drug.
⁹ And this is the hill I will die on.
Eli Asch is the Race Director of the Twin Cities Marathon (held in Minneapolis/St. Paul the first Sunday of every October — save the date!), but the opinions contained here are entirely his. You can find him on Twitter, to fruitlessly argue that Frank Shorter is the greatest American marathoner of all-time, at @Eli_Runs. He recommends you bring your Best of Era lists.
