The IAAF World rankings

If you have recently visited the IAAF site you must have noticed that whenever they refer to some athlete they give in parentheses the specialty and the athlete's ranking in it. The World Rankings is something the IAAF has introduced recently. It is based on a combination of result and place where, depending on the level of the competition, a certain number of points are attributed. The typical ranking period is of 12 months with a minimum of five performance scores required in order to accumulate a ranking score. For some more demanding events the period can be longer and the number of performance scores lower. 

The important question is how will the ranking be used in the future. It is clear that the qualification for this year's World Championships will be on the familiar basis of minimum performances. Most probably this will be true also for next year's Olympics. However there is a definite plan to use the World Rankings for the qualification at the World Championships from 2021 onwards.

When one reads the technical part of the ranking system one encounters a mention of point reduction for results that would otherwise have been considered non-valid, like downhill marathon or wind-assisted sprints and horizontal jumps. I would be particularly interested in the wind speed corrections and rest assured that I will report on this point as soon as something tangible appears. 

In the meantime and since the end of February, whenever one reads an article on the IAAF site the world ranking of each athlete is given (based on the simulation obtained from last year's results). I guess we'll have to get accustomed to this.

The 60 m hurdles of the European Indoors: two great races

I will definitely write a full report on the 2019 European Indoors but in the meantime I cannot resist the temptation to write about the two races I enjoyed most: the 60 m hurdles finals for men and women. 

I have been following Milan Trajkovic for quite a few years now. He is a great hurdler. I remember how he managed to qualify for the 110 m olympic final in Rio, running in a heavy storm (which obliged the organisers to proceed to a repêchage, giving a second chance to some of the most renowned participants who otherwise would have been eliminated). That was not the first time Trajkovic was running in the rain. I recall the 110 m final in the 2016, Amsterdam, Europeans where Trajkovic used the jacket of this tracksuit to cover the girl who was assisting with the athletes's stuff and who was getting soaked under the rain.

Trajkovic in the rain-soaked 2016 final

In the 2018 World Indoors Trajkovic made it to the final and was, to my eyes, a very serious candidate for a medal. (His semi-final time would have sufficed for a bronze medal in the final). But then Trajkovic false-started and was disqualified. I was expecting him to do something in the 2018 European Outdoors but it turned out that 2018 was not a lucky year for him: he got injured in spring and thus was not in optimal condition at the Europeans.

Trajkovic and Douvalidis congratulating each other

He took his vengeance in this year's European Indoors. And the funny thing is that he almost went out in the semis where a series of technical mistakes (and, in particular, hitting hard the last hurdle) brought him to fourth place. Fortunately he was qualified on the basis of time. In the final he took an excellent start and never relinquished the first place. P. Martinot-Lagarde tried to make up his initial delay but did not quite manage, as for the favourite, R. Ortega, he was somehow not quite there. Be that as it may, Trajkovic won the european title and we where rewarded by a second (after that for Tentoglou) sounding of the greek national anthem, since the national anthem of Cyprus is that of Greece. 

Vetter, Visser and Broersen

I have already written about the three "wondermeisjes" (that's wondewomen in dutch) from Holland. And as the three musketeers they are in fact four. Dafne Schippers has world champion titles over 200 m (and an olympic silver over the same distance) as well as a world bronze medal for heptathlon. Nadine Broersen was world champion for indoor pentathlon and european vice-champion for heptathlon. (She missed this year's indoors due to injury). Annuk Vetter was european champion and world bronze medalist in heptathlon (but dropped out of this year's pentathlon due to injury). 

Visser winning hands down the 60 m hurdles final

Nadine Visser, the youngest of them all, did not have a title till this year. Several time finalist of global events in heptathlon, she decided, since last year, to focus on her best discipline, the hurdles. Already bronze medalist of last year's World indoors, she dominated completely this year's competition. C. Roleder, the reigning european champion, could only grab the silver medal, while E. Herman, last year's revelation when she won the european title over 100 m hurdles, had to contend herself with bronze.
I was already keeping an eye on Visser but now I have one more reason to do so.

Greek style throws revisited

In previous post of mine I wrote about two greek throwing events. Both of them had figured in the Olympics. The first, stone throw, is not an exclusively greek discipline since it is also part of the Highland Games, although the rules and as a consequence the throwing style are quite different. The other one, greek-style discus throw is, as I argued, a rather artificial discipline, now defunct, which was introduced in the first Olympics because nobody knew how to throw the discus. There were a few points that had left me unhappy in those posts. For instance, I was unable to find a decent photo of a throwing stone. Fortunately, since the publication of those articles I had managed to make some progress and I decided to write this follow-up post. 

Let us start with the stone throw. Thanks to my friend K. Tsagkarakis I met D. Mpontikoulis who has created singlehandedly a museum of athletics. I had the chance to meet M. Mpontikoulis who gave me an interview for the blog and a guided visit of his museum. (A post on this is under preparation and will appear in a not too distant future).  Among the many exhibits of his museum there were several stones, and I could, at long last, present a decent photo of the implement. 

The three stones in the photo correspond to the senior, junior and youth implements. The heavier one has a weight of 6.4 kg (I explain the origin of this choice in my post on stone-throw). The lighter ones have a weight of roughly 4 kg and 2.5 kg. (Had a women's implement existed it should have had a weight in the range of 3-3.5 kg, but the discipline disappeared while women's athletics were just picking up). In fact there is a whole treasure trove of stones in the museum.

According to M. Mpontikoulis they are the stones that were cut for the 1906 Olympics. Most probably a large quantity was ordered and a few were selected and re-worked so as to bring down their weight to the exact regulatory one. As I explained in my post on stone throw, the discipline has made a single appearance in the olympic program, in the 1906 intercalated Olympics. It has survived in the greek championships till 1955. However a close look at the results shows that the discipline was losing steam for decades. The typical post WWII greek champion obtained his title with a performance of around 18 m. One has to go back to pre-war results in order to find 19 m performances with a peak at 20.25 m in 1925. And what is even more astonishing is that the best performance is the one of N. Georgantas (the olympic champion of 1906) who threw 20.45 in 1908. Given the evolution, it is clear that in 1955 the stone throw was ready for retirement.

This is also true for greek-style discus throw. The discipline figured in the greek championships program till 1957 with the last champion winning with a throw of less than 30 m. However 20 years before that, N. Syllas threw a whopping 42.98 m which was heralded by the newspapers of the time as a new world record. (It was certainly the best performance ever registered, but one must keep in mind that in the 30s nobody outside Greece was throwing in this style).

One mysterious occurrence is the existence in the results of the greek athletics' championships of a greek-style javelin throw. Javelin throw made its appearance in the olympic program in 1906. On the occasion of the 1908 Olympics two distinct events were staged: "free style" and "held in the middle". In the former the manner of holding the javelin was left to the absolute discretion of each competitor. In the latter the javelin had to be held by the grip, and no other method of holding was admissible. The free-style event did not survive, most probably because most competitors did hold the javelin by the middle and, in any case, the results of the two events were quite similar. I do not think that the greek-style is a variant of the free style. For a few years after 1908 the program of the greek championships comprised the events of ακοντισμός javelin throw and ελληνικός ακοντισμός greek-style javelin throw. In a compilation of results of junior competitions of 1912 one finds references to free-style javelin throw and to greek-style javelin throw. In the greek 1919 championships there were two events in the program: "free-style javelin throw" (ελεύθερος ακοντισμός) and "javelin throw" (ακοντισμός). (One can safely surmise that the latter is the "held in the middle" style). In the 1924 program there figured just one event: ελληνικός ακοντισμός i.e. greek javelin throw. Moreover, the book of T. Sakellariou on throw training, published in 1930, is referring to javelin throw as greek javelin throw and then goes on to describe the discipline as we know it today. Finally, the javelin history page refers to Lemming as having won, in the 1908 Olympics, first official title in  the "greekstyle" or "orthodox" javelin event. (As a matter of fact he won also the free-style one).

For me, all this is an indication that the greek-style moniker is a reference to the greek heritage of the event and not a technical specification. Greek-style javelin throw is just javelin throw.  

Having solved this paradox I cannot resist the temptation to mention that a really free-style javelin throw did briefly exist, with spectacular results. It's the spanish, rotational style, invented by F. Erauskin, a style which revolutionised the discipline in 1956 and which was immediately banned by the IAAF purists. You can find the details in my article on the "javelin controversy".