Women's decathlon revisited

The regular readers of this blog have certainly noticed my love for combined events. And the king among them is the decathlon. For me the decathlon is something magical and I have trouble understanding why women are confined to the watered-down version that constitutes the heptathlon. If we are vying for a complete parity between men and women in sports then it is high time to make the decathlon the official combined event for women. Unless we do this we will not have real combined events specialists but just girls who excel in one or two disciplines and can put together a decent heptathlon. I am fully aware that there exist (or have existed) many great heptathletes among women and I have a great admiration for most of them. But somehow I feel that they are not on par with the great male decathletes.

I had started to believe that women's decathlon was dead and buried but then I stumbled upon the site of Women's Decathlon Association. They have done a great statistical work compiling an extended list of all performances over 5000 points as well as the top individual performances for each event. Here is the list of the ten best women's decathlons of all times: 

Unfortunately the most recent entry goes back to 2006. Let's hope that the situation will improve in the future. And here is the list of the best performances per event. 

The current world record holder A. Skujyte has the lion's share with three  best performances but it is interesting to notice that, just like in heptathlon, B. Spotakova holds the best javelin performance. A minor surprise is the S. Dragila, a 6999 points decathlete and 4.83 pole vaulter does not hold the best pole vault performance (but, to be fair, when she competed in the decathlon, where she jumped 4.10 m, her pole vault best was 4.40 m).

US decathlon record holder Jordan Gray

But, what is more important, they are organising a decathlon championship. They started in 2018, even before the association was officially created, and they did it again this year.  On this occasion J. Gray established a new US record, just shy of 8000 points, moving to the third place overall in women's decathlon. Here are the full results.

Women's decathlon has been in limbo practically since its introduction, back in 2004. I was hoping that with the introduction of women's pole vault, moving from heptathlon to decathlon would have been a mere formality. And I was not alone in this line of thought.

You may remember Becca Gillespy Peter, the woman behind Pole Vault Power, from my post on pole vault

Becca Gillespy Peter

For her the obvious step after pole vault was the decathlon. In her own words

“I wanted to do decathlon when I was in high school, but girls pole vault was brand new. Senior year was the first year we had pole vault in our state. ‘Decathlon is the next thing,’ I thought at the time. ‘It’s not here yet, but it’ll be here soon”.

Well, a decade and a half later, the women’s decathlon has yet to arrive. And she continues

“I don’t want to bash the heptathlon, which is an amazing event,” she says. “But it is less demanding than the decathlon, which is widely seen as finding the world’s best all-round athlete. What kind of message does that send to women and girls? In effect, they are being told they can’t be the world’s greatest athlete, that they can’t do as many events as men. And that isn’t right”.

Olympic and World pole vault champion, S. Dragila is categorical. 

"The heptathlon is really too easy for elite women. You find someone who’s fast and powerful, they dominate the heptathlon. I think there just needs to be another technical event in there to set the field apart".

Dragila's decathlon record was never homologated as a national one. And the same is true for the record of J. Stary going back to 1980.

So, where does the resistance to women's decathlon come from? The only criticism which I find perfectly justified is the one concerning the order of events. Permuting first and second day field events with respect to the men's decathlon is not such a good idea. For L. Gramantik, the coach of D. Warner, 

“Reversing the order of the events for women is a terrible sequence considering the physical challenge of the events, where day one would be predominantly technical, followed by speed power on day two”.

And then there is the resistance of the heptathletes themselves. For them the decathlon would mean having to learn two more technical events (discus and pole-vault) and risk being less succesful than in the heptathlon.

Becca Gillespy Peter, for her part, says she is sympathetic to these concerns 

“If there is ever going to be a switch to the women’s decathlon, you need at least eight years – or two Olympic cycles – to implement it as it is unfair to destroy the career of a current elite heptathlete”.

Are we going to see a women's decathlon in the 2028, Los Angeles, Olympics? I am not very optimistic about this, but the fact that there exist a US-centric action in favour of this discipline allows a sliver of hope.