On theories of scoring

I have always been a scoring buff. One of my first posts in this blog was on how, when I was just 10 years old, I tried to reconstruct the decathlon scoring tables from the results on the Melbourne, 1956, olympic decathlon. For reasons even myself cannot fathom I am attracted to the concept of scoring and I am regularly revisiting the subject. 

Quantitative measurements allow comparisons of the performance of competitors within the same event but the situation becomes more complicated when different events are involved. Everybody would agree that the performance of a world champion in some event is better than that of an inexperienced competitor in a different event. But we should be able to make this comparison more precise and to distinguish performances on which only specialists could a priori pronounce themselves? And then there is the question of how does one score combined events.

R. Johnson and C.K. Yang 

at the unforgettable 1960 olympic decathlon

Performance scoring is a science and an art. There exist stupid individuals who believe that, since they have mastered the workings of spreadsheets, they can produce scoring tables.  Usually the only thing they succeed in doing is to convince everyone of their incompetence. Developing acceptable scoring tables for athletics took, literally, decades. The theory of scoring and the history of scoring tables is a most interesting topic and I intend to cover it in a series of posts which will be, as always, interspersed with other articles, some of them inspired by current events (crossing my fingers that activity will indeed pick up in the coming months).