Light men throwing

Four years ago I published an article entitled "Heavy men running". At that time I had a subscription to D. Harder's "Speed and Strength" newsletter and I had stumbled upon an interesting list of records by bodyweight. I analysed Dale's data and presented my conclusions. A surprising (at least to me) fact was that even overweight men could complete a marathon. If you are intrigued by this I recommend that you go back to that post of mine and get the details.

Since Harder is presenting data not only for track but also for field events I was planning to write an article on them but I was holding back because of the imperial measures. Harder, as most Americans, is working with inches, feet, yards, and pounds, things that are so 19th century. And while I understand that the US do not wish to spend the money and energy in order to switch to the metric system I do not get the use of imperial units in sport. I was dispirited by the idea of having to do the conversions but recently, while tidying up my files, I found the newsletter and decided to stop procrastinating.

I opted to focus on the shot put where the range of thrower weights was substantial: over a factor of 2 between the heavier and the lighter. The results are shown in the figure below. 

The continuous line corresponds to an exponential fit. From the values of the fit parameters one can infer that the gains in the throw length with increasing body mass are minimal for the elite throwers, the longest estimated throw being around 24 m. At the other end of the spectrum, one finds that the throw length goes to zero for a body mass around 35 kg. I don't know if there are adult men, of normal stature, with such a light weight (some women do exist though, weighing even below 30 kg). But situating the zero-throw capability at around that low a body mass is not unreasonable. 

There was one list that kindled my interest, that of the decathlon. Here is the figure of performance versus body mass obtained from Harder's data. 

In the upper part of the graph one finds the various elite decathletes with performances over 8000 points. However there exist also three points, spanning the domain of 6000-4000 points. They are due to L. Riedel, B. Oldfield and O. Buder, respectively olympic and world discus throw champion, shot put world record thrower (whose records were, alas, not homologated) and european shot put silver medalist. If one tries to extrapolate from these three last points one obtains a maximum body mass of around 160-170 kg. This is really absurd since there are shot putters in that weight range who can definitely score some points in the decathlon. The name I have in mind is that of I. Ivanov from Kazachstan, medalist at the Asian games and a 20+ m thrower who weighs upwards to 160 kg. He should definitely be able to obtain some score in the decathlon even scoring a zero in the hurdles and pole vault. 

Speaking of which, reminds me of something I read in the 50s. As I have explained I was already interested in the decatlhon and was not missing even the most trifling news. So I remember having seen in a greek sports' newspaper a short paragraph on S. Meconi (European shot put record holder) who had completed a decathlon and obtained something around 2500 points.

Of course it might have been a decathlon disputed as a joke, but still I found it rather shocking that he could not do better than that. Meconi was a 120 kg athlete and it is most probable that at that time the throwers were not working on their speed but just tried to capitalise on their strength. Things have changed since then.