The curious sports classification of the IOC

I do not care much about winter sports and thus I do not follow the Winter Olympics. The only disciplines I pay any attention to are figure skating (but these last few years I do not care much even for this) and snowboard cross (which I find great). Be that as it may, I was somehow intrigued when I read that there are only 7 sports contested in this year's Winter Olympics. So I looked closer and I found that the IOC has a somewhat curious classifications of sports.

The competitions which are part of the Olympic Games are in order: sports, disciplines, events, phases and units.

Sports are those governed by international federations. Athletics is obviously a sport. Curiously swimming is not. It is just a discipline part of the sport "aquatics". Finswimming (my discipline) is not a sport either: the IOC recognises "underwater sports" of which finswimming is a discipline. There are 28 Summer Olympic international federations (and 7 more Winter ones) to which one must add 36 more which, while recognised, are not part of the Olympics program.

Disciplines refer to parts of a sport, just like swimming is part of aquatics, together with diving, water polo and artistic swimming (previously known as "synchronised"). Athletics has disciplines also. One can think of the ensemble of track events and that of field events as disciplines but I feel that a better classification of disciplines would be a distinction between stadium and road events. Or perhaps outdoor and indoor. 

Events are competitions which give rise to a medal award. Thus pole vault, decathlon or 4x100 m relay race are events. They give rise to a classification. Events can also be team ones and they do exist in athletics, for instance in cross, albeit not in the olympic program.

Phases are parts of an event. Combined events obviously consist of phases. But the various qualifying rounds, semi-finals and final are also phases of a given event.

Units are the last subdivision. The series of the heptathlon 800 m are units of the 800 m heptathlon phase. The same goes, for instance, for the quarter-finals of some event.

All this looks pretty logical, and it is. So, why am I speaking about a "curious" classification? Well, it has to do with the uppermost level. A sport is tied to an international federation. Suppose that in some remote future the IOC decides to include finswimming in the Summer Olympics program. (I am sure that this is not going to happen during my lifetime). Under the present status finswimming will be a sport. But suppose that FINA, the international swimming federation, wants to control this and gives their assent only provided finswimming comes into the Olympics governed by them. Then finswimming would not be a sport but a discipline, part of aquatics. So at the topmost level the definition of sport becomes purely political. This is what I find somewhat curious.

E. Karalis at world record heights

In last year's European Indoors' report I wrote about the young greek pole vaulter E. Karalis who was participating for the first time at a major championship. I said that I was going to keep an eye open for him (and, in case you  are wondering, the fact that he is greek did indeed influence my choice).

Karalis' 5.78m jump

His summer appearance was not as good as expected but this winter he is back to the top improving the U20 world record with a 5.78 mark. People will point out that A. Duplantis has jumped higher. However his marks cannot be recognised as a world record. In last year's 5.82 m there was no doping control and in this year's 5.83 m performance the bar supports were too wide (75 mm while the authorised limit is 55 mm), and the doping control was performed only one day later. Of course, Duplantis has a 5.90 m outdoor U20 world record and thus there is no doubt as to who is the top young pole vaulter. Still the fact that Karalis is pursuing his ascension is great news for all of us greek athletics fans. 

PS We did not have to wait for very long. Less than two weeks later Duplantis got back his record with a 5.88 m jump in Clermont-Ferrand.

Justice for an athletics' giant

In June 2015 I published a post on a most infuriating point in the IAAF's site athletes' section. Al Oerter's results were mentioned with an unbelievable omission of the 1964, Tokyo, Olympics victory. Since this section has been recently revamped I did check and at long last the omission/injustice was repaired. 

As you can verify yourselves, Oerter is now correctly credited with four olympic victories. All is well that ends well? Hm, not quite. As you can see there is one thing still lacking: a photo of Oerter. Were he an obscure, also ran, athlete I could understand this. But the IAAF failing to get hold of a photo of Oerter when Google has dozens of them is something I have trouble understanding. (On the other hand the photo medallion is empty even in King Carl's profile, so this has probably something to do with the source IAAF is using for the athletes photos).

As in my previous post I did check the page of Jesse Owens, and here things are getting worse. It is still devoid of information (except for Owens' citizenship). I understand that populating the profiles of all prominent athletes of the 20th century can be a formidable task, but Owens is not just anybody.

Still one must be fair. The new athletes' pages are a substantial improvement over the previous ones. For years I have been wondering why in the athlete's results no mention of continental championships existed. If that was due to the some ill-conceived separation of responsibilities between the IAAF and the continental federations it remains that it was rendering useless something that could have been a great statistical tool. Fortunately this has now been remedied. The information is now particularly rich (at least for some of the athletes, probably those who were still active in the last decade or so). I checked the page of K. Stefanidi and it has her results in the Olympic Games, World championships, World Indoors, World's U20, World's U18, Europeans, Diamond League, European Indoor's, European Team championships, World University Games, European U23, National and NCAA championships. Pretty impressive! (What is also equally impressive is that Katerina has obtained a medal in every single competition of this lengthy list).