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World Points Standings:
What Are They?

Posted July 26th, 2008 at 9:00 AM by Jesse Squire

Section: News & Results, Track & Field, Rankings, World Standings

No doubt you’ve seen the World Points Standings that I regularly post here. But you might be wondering what they are and where they come from.

They are a numerical summary of each athlete’s accomplishments in the 2008 season. Wins and losses in big meets and small and times run under various conditions are a complex set of variables. My intention is to put it together in a meaningful form. But if you really need to know how I get them, keep reading.

The template from which I work is not original. The IAAF keeps points standings in each event for its World Athletics Tour of the globe’s top outdoor invitational meets. Those meets are classified into different levels: Golden League, Super Grand Prix, Grand Prix, and Permit. The scoring system originated in the 1980s and treated all meets on the circuit equally, even though they clearly were not, and the system has been adjusted. Golden League and Super GP meets score double that of the Grand Prix meets, and Permits score roughly half.

However, there are many other important competitions that aren’t part of the World Tour, such as the Olympics. That will score five times that of the Grand Prix, while the season-ending World Athletics Final will score triple the GP level. Other events, such as championships of the world’s top nations, the World Indoor and World Cross Country Championships, and various other meets all are scored. If you’re interested, I have the rundown on a Google doc.

Wins and losses and places are the most important part of track & field, but another central feature of the sport is times, distances & heights. Analyzing an athlete’s marks are clearly an important part of evaluating his accomplishments. I wanted a way of rewarding athletes for running good times in the same way that a true fan notices them: “hey, that doesn’t come along very often”.

So I compiled a scoring template that awards up to ten bonus points. The table has nine levels (with an additional point for the year’s best mark) based on the first, 10th, 25th, 50th, 100th, 200th, 300th, 400th, and 500th best marks of the last ten years (once those made by convicted or admitted dopers are tossed out). For the sprints, hurdles and horizontal jumps, adjustments for wind and altitude are factored in.

So where did all this come from? Two things.

A few years back I was playing around with creating a track & field fantasy league (one that never got off the ground, by the way). I didn’t like the IAAF’s World Rankings, and pretty much no one else did. They were heavily based on marks and used place in the competition as merely a supplement, while it really should be the reverse. They went away a year ago and no one missed them. They created some ridiculously strange results; the unofficial continuation of those rankings has Usain Bolt at #4 in the 100 meters. Really. And the guy keeps it up to date. So I was determined to come up with a better system.

I also noticed a problem inherent in the old GP points system and the current Golden League. When comparing athletes from different events for an overall champion, both systems reward winning alone, and the big money has not always gone to the best athletes but sometimes the ones with the weakest competition. What the sport really needs to reward is a pair or trio of rivals who continually go head-to-head with their at the biggest meets, rarely if ever lose to anyone else, and put up great marks while doing it. Tony Reavis has noted quite often how this is a great weakness in the sport. By allowing athletes to score a lot even by losing, so long as they do it well, I think I’ve addressed this.

Until I started to try it out, I didn’t realize that I had invented almost a real-time version of Track & Field News‘ World Rankings. Their time-honored system is the result of a “town hall” type of meeting between great minds using fairly simple criteria. They reward placing high, with an emphasis on actually winning, at the biggest meets. So does my system. They reward consistency over the whole season. So does my system. They reward a big marks, but doing it against inferior competition does not make up for avoiding the heavyweights in bigger meets. So does my system.

Is it useful for predicting who wins at a meet? Is it helpful for the IAAF Fantasy League and USATF’s Pick & Win? It has its uses. The system doesn’t reward part-timers in an event but they can obviously do quite well, so it’s a starting point when evaluating who to pick. Since it summarizes the whole season, you need to look at trends to see who’s running well right now. And it’s all about past performance, which they always say does not guarantee future value. But it’s a heck of a lot better than flying blind.