A fabulous article on French decathletes

The site Décapassion has just published a great article on French decathletes. I have already written about this superb site due to Frédéric Gousset. It is, to my eyes the best decathlon site on the web. For the Gousset family, decathlon is not just an athletic discipline, it's a passion.

This time they published an article on the history of french combined events. It's in french but you should not let that discourage you. Just use Google to translate to your preferred language and enjoy a great article on decathlon. One learns thus that, well before the first olympic decathlon in 1908, a general athletic championship was organised in France, already in 1892, with 10 events over 3 days. And an octathlon, disputed over a single day, was introduced in 1904.

Georges Hébert, a military instructor, posing in the photo below, 

introduced a combined event aiming at testing the physical condition of the soldiers. It comprised 10 events and was based on an (admittedly primitive) scoring table. Later he introduced a dodecathlon which included two swimming events (one in apnea!) as well. 

Alas, Hébert's combined events and their scoring were not competition-oriented. 

What I found really interesting in the article of Décapassion was the list of French decathletes who have scored more than 8000 points. They are 23 in all, with Romain Barras leading the group, having completed 35 events over 8000 points in the period 2003-2016. 

In an article of mine entitled "who is the best decathlete" I presented an analysis of the scores of the world's best performers compared to their potential maximum. R. Sebrle and T. Dvorak were the ones coming closest to their maximum with 97 %. O'Brien, who is probably the best decathlete of the modern era, has a decathlon score of only 94 % of his potential maximum. K. Mayer is between the two, with a 96 % score. So, I took the list of Décapassion and calculated the fraction of the decathlon score with respect to the potential maximum of each athlete. 

R. Barras is one of the best performers with a 97 % score. (The best of the list is Axel Hubert with 98.3 % but then this score is based on his unique great decathlon, the one from 2020 when he won the national championships). An interesting score is that of William Motti whose decathlon best is at just 91.3 % of his theoretical maximum. This confirms the feeling I have always had that Motti was a great talent who has never managed to fully realise his potential. (But let's not forget that he scored 8550 points in an unofficial competition which would improve his score to roughly 94 %).

As I said at the beginning of the article, if you are, like myself, a decathlon fan you must absolutely visit the Décapassion page and read their fascinating article on the history of french decathlon.