Athletics Records
A slight change of topic here. I was wondering why is the woman's marathon record so good? Currently it's held by our own Paula Radcliffe in 2hours 15 minutes and 25 seconds. This is only 108% of the men's record, which is 2 hours 4 minutes and 55 seconds.Now I'd always assumed this was because women are closer to men in performance over longer distances. But in fact the 100m record is only 107% of the men's.
The reason the marathon record is amazing is that women actually seem to get worse relative to men the longer the race. This chart shows the women's record as a % of men's for all the races from the 100m to the 100,000m. The marathon is shown by the arrow.
Indeed take out the marathon, and the regression line is actually quite a good fit with an r-squared of 75%, and a regression line that says woman's records as a % of men are 103% + the log of 0.01 times the distance in m.
The reasons for this I don't know. One might be that woman very rarely run the other longer distances, and so the records might be 'bad'. However the 5000m is ran often and that is 'worse' than the marathon record.
The other interesting thing is the women's record at the short-end, i.e the 100m and 150m seem 'too good'. These are held by the late Florence Griffith-Joyner, whose records were massively better than any race before (or even since I think). Thus the relative performance of women at the short end might actually be worse than it looks here.
Update There's some interesting comments in the comments section. Having read them I did this chart looks at the 88 best performances in four different races in 2002, again with women as a % of men on the vertical axis, and this time position in 2002 best times on the horizontal. There's all kinds of things wrong with this analysis (I think I should only include each person once?), but at least it shows that the 100m is the closest of them all. This, the more I think about it, might be down to the fact that the start is a major part of the time, and there is less difference in the starting ability of men and women.
It also shows that the 3000m and the marathon are very similar in profile, and that it seems the reason the world record is nearer the men's is down to their being a few very good individual woman who run a few very good times, particularly Paula Radcliffe.
posted by Matthew @ 6/20/2004 05:58:00 PM
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