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May 7, 2017 4:17 AM

With a few months left until the IAAF World Championships begin, the European Athletic Association is proposing a reset of all European and World records set before 2005, as anti-doping testing was not to modern standards.

The validity of some long-standing records has been brought to question over the years, and even some athletes see them as detrimental to their own accomplishments - during the World Championships in Berlin (where Usain Bolt set the historic 9.58 100m World Record), Veronica Campbell-Brown claimed one of the reasons womens' races are less respected than the mens' is because people are excited to see them run because they know the possibility of breaking the record is close.. This opinion gains weight, as Yelena Isinbayeva was one of the most popular athletes of the later half of the previous decade, after winning two OIympic gold medals and two World Championships, but also became the first woman to vault over 5 meters and breaking 30 World Records, outdoor and indoor, adding 24 centimetres between her first record in 2003 (4.82m) and last in 2009 (5.06m). As of now, only four of the womens' sprinting and medium distance records of events in the Olympics would stand (Kendra Harrison in the 100m hurdles, Genzebe Dibaba in the 1500m, Ruth Jebet in the 3000m stepplechase and the US in the 4×100 m relay).

The IAAF will decide late in July to follow the recommendation of European Athletics to reset the records, but IAAF chief executive Olivier Gers calls the EAA proposal bold, while president Sebastian Coe allegedly agrees with erasing some of the most questionable records, a opinion shared by Dafne Schippers who thinks it would be best to "skip that period" (pre mandatory random testing). In August, she will defend her 200m title - the day she was born in July 92, the record for the event was almost 4 year old, and her best (third all-time) is a staggering .29 seconds slower.

On the other side are former athletes - World Olympians Association has opposed the proposal, as it would "inevitably lead to innocent record holders being stripped of their achievements", Paula Radcliffe (who holds the Marathon WR since 2003) and Jonathan Edwards (Triple Jump since 1995) are also opposed to it for the same reasons. Women's High Jump record holder and current president of the Bulgarian Olympic Committee Stefka Kostadinova calls the proposal a mockery, and Mike Powell, who beat the Men's Long Jump record during the insane final in the Tokyo Championships in 1991 threatened to fight the decision in the courts.

As reference, some differences between the records that could be erased and the best post-2005 marks that could become World Records:

Mens'
Pole Vault (outdoors): 6.14m Sergei Bubka (1994) > 6.04m Brad Walker (2008) (-10cm)
High Jump: 2.45m Javier Sotomayor (1993) > Mutaz Essa Barshim (2015) (-2cm)
Long Jump: 8.95m Mike Powell (1991) > 8.74m Dwight Phillips (2009) (-21 cm)
Triple Jump: 18.29m Jonathan Edwards (1995) > 18.21m Christian Taylor (2015) (-8cm)
Shot Put: 23.12m Randy Barnes (1990) > 22.56m Joe Kovacs (2015) (-56cm)
Discus Throw: 74.08m Jürgen Schult (1986) > 73.38 Gerd Kanter (2006) (-70cm)
Hammer Throw: 86.74m Yuriy Sedykh (1986) > 84.90m Vadim Devyatovskiy* (2005) (-1.84m)
Javelin: 98.48 m Jan Železný (1996) > 93.90m Thomas Röhler (2017) (-4.58m)

Womens'
100m: 10.49 Florence Griffith-Joyner (1988) > 10.64 Carmelita Jeter (2009) (+.15)
200m: 21.34 Florence Griffith Joyner (1988) > 21.63 Dafne Schippers (2015) (+.29)
400m : 47.60 Marita Koch (1985) > 48.70 Sanya Richards (2006) (+1.1)
800m: 1:53.28 Jarmila Kratochvílová (1983) > 1:54.01 Pamela Jelimo (2008) (+.73)
High Jump: 2.09m Stefka Kostadinova (1987) > 2.08m Blanka Blasic (2009) (-1 cm)
Long Jump: 7.52m Galina Chistyakova (1988) > 7.31m Brittney Reese (2016) (-21 cm)
Triple Jump: 15.50m Inessa Kravets (1995) > 15.39m Françoise Mbango Etone (2008) (- 11cm)
Shot Put: 22.63m Natalya Lisovskaya (1987) > 21.70m Nadzeya Ostapchuk* (2010) (-93cm)
Discus Throw: 76.80m Gabriele Reinsch (1988) > 71.08m Sandra Perković (2014) (-5.72m)
Heptathlon: 7291 Jackie Joyner-Kersee (1988) > 7032 Carolina Klüft (2007) (-259)

posted by lmfsilva (23 comments total)

Ross Tucker of the Science of Sport discussed this with the most excellent Off the Ball team, and also in a blog post, On the Recalibration of World Records.
posted by grounded at 5:07 AM on May 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

Why stop at a single reset when you can have decennial resets? You know, just like comic books and their totally not desperate business model and profit maximization.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:23 AM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

That's kind of a really ridiculous reading of what is going on here.

This is a tacit admission that records pre-out of competition testing are doped. The people who have a greivance are those records set 1995-ish to 2005 - which is a very small number. But that 2005 date does make the issue look a bit more equally dispersed.
posted by JPD at 5:57 AM on May 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

I don't know whether those figures are representative, but if they are then it's pretty clear there was something going on in women's sports that ended around 1987/1988.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:18 AM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

The people who have a greivance are those records set 1995-ish to 2005 - which is a very small number.

Only one of the women's records is from that timespan.
posted by Etrigan at 6:19 AM on May 7, 2017

I don't know whether those figures are representative, but if they are then it's pretty clear there was something going on in women's sports that ended around 1987/1988.

Out of competition drug testing was introduced in the US in 1989.
posted by hoyland at 7:02 AM on May 7, 2017 [8 favorites]

So someone will be the new world record holder but not really. Everyone wil know if they are still behind the old record, will that really mean respect for them? It'll just make them look like the pretend world record holder.
posted by biffa at 7:03 AM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Paid meets and some national federations give cash bonuses for breaking records. So records aren't being expunged as much as this is a way for people under modern testing scrutiny to get rewarded for being the fastest/strongest/whateverest in their cohort.
posted by thecjm at 7:13 AM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm OK with it if resetting the records would help bring more eyes into the events, particularly in womens' sprinting, just not sure how to draw that line without looking petty, arbitrary, or gerrymander the whole thing.

The problem here is defining what is a "suspicious result" without falling into the usual pitfalls and so setting a line in the calendar (as pointed out by Ross Tucker). Some records are old because, well, it was more than just having the muscles and high O2 levels, and are fringey sports that had a high technical component where there might not exist any money or national prestige.
I mean, the same man that coached Bubka (Vitaly Petrov) also coached Giblisco, Isinbayeva, Murer and Braz, all of them World and/or Olympic champions. Zelezny technically was something else (Yego, who has the now 4th personal best ever, learned from watching his and Thorkildsen videos on YouTube). Sedykh had his "dance" and the body coordination of, well, a professional dancer.
I think there's some difference between them, Koch and Schult (who still had a notorious career into the 90s, but given the place and time of the record, hard to imagine it wasn't spiked), Barnes (that was eventually banned by the twilight of his career) and Flo-Jo (who retired once the Ben Johnson scandal was leading towards tighter controls).

Then there's the issue of giving and taking records away. I recall one athlete that got bumped from a silver to a gold medal 6 years or so after the event, and claimed the whole thing was just opening old wounds - the moment had passed, the opportunities one would get as a champion were not coming back and getting a gold medal in the mail did not bring any peace whatsoever. Can't imagine having a world record without a victory lap and a celebratory photo next to the scoreboard is the same.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:35 AM on May 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

It's interesting to see how many of the track and field records are still valid from the PED period when in comparison the number of records in swimming that have been failing in recent years means that few if any exist from the PED period. I wonder if that's due to significant advances in the swimming technique as well as the advances in equipment (swimsuits) and pool technology (pools have vastly less chop). In comparison those sort of advances in track and field technique just haven't been as numerous outside of the endurance events. It seems like the most notable advances in Track have been around Bolt being successful despite being what has historically been an unfavored body type.
posted by vuron at 7:46 AM on May 7, 2017

It's an interesting idea. I suspect that people would adapt to the pre/current era difference pretty easily because of how we saw it play out in cycling. Cycling's "hour record" has three eras of records and it only took a couple years for people to integrate the idea. We have one old era for unlimited equipment, one old era for limited equipment but probably doping, and one era for limited equipment and modern (admittedly imperfect) anti-doping controls.

The governing body of the sport, UCI, basically looked at the old records that were ridden on increasingly-strange hyper-aerodynamic bicycles, since banned for being too un-bike-like, and realized that no modern competitor could touch those old records. So they simply bifurcated the record books and said that all old records on now-banned bikes still stand but get magically moved to the new Best Human Effort category. They also moved all women's records from the worst doping era into Best Human Effort regardless of equipment, so there's relevance here.

In 2014 they then integrated their normal anti-doping program (year-round biological passport testing) and we got a third era.

Since that era split we've seen many hour record attempts with several new records. When fans talk about records and upcoming attempts, etc., there's rarely confusion about what we're talking about. Similarly, everyone recognizes the previous record-holders from the earlier eras as being the best of their class. (Well, except for arguments about Sosenka's 2005 record which happened right in between two doping bans that ended up with him being banned for life from the sport. There's always argument about that one.)
posted by introp at 9:50 AM on May 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

Gymnastics at the international level has also been through a major scoring change, though it's not due to doping. A new scoring system was introduced at the 2008 Olympics (if I remember right). It did away with the Perfect 10 model of scoring in favor of an open-ended scoring system that combined an execution score with a difficulty score based on values assigned to each skill.

In addition, the International Gymnastics Federation releases a new Code of Points for each quad. The new one for 2017-2020 downgrades the value of a number of skills, and also makes some skills that were routinely done, such as "roll-out" skills on floor, where the gymnast's head is the first thing to return to the mat, illegal for safety reasons (this is newly true in men's; roll-out skills have been illegal in women's gymnastics for a long time). One of the effects of this change is that everybody's scores are lower across the board than they were as recently as a year ago. So you can't easily compare an elite gymnast's 2016 scores to their 2017 scores.

This isn't quite the same thing, because there aren't world records in gymnastics. But it means that the sport and its fans have gotten used to having to adjust expectations every four years as the federation tweaks the Code. So I'm confident that track and field fans could adapt to the idea that there was a major change in how their sport was practiced at a certain time, and that this change means that you can't make easy comparisons between results before and after that change. And, as time passes, it will fade farther into history and be even less of an issue.

I also suspect that casual four-year fans like myself, who watch track and field at the Olympics and rarely at other times, won't necessarily notice at all. If you tell me at the 2020 Olympics that the world record was 14.4 seconds and that this athlete has just set a new record of 14.2 seconds, I'm just going to be all "Whoo! How exciting!" I'm not going to think, "Wait a minute, wasn't there that one athlete who did this specific race in 14.1 back in the 90s?" I think it could be good for athlete morale, too. They're not going to think their record isn't real, but that they've been let out from under the shadow of a time when records were artificially inflated. That's how it seems to me anyway.
posted by Orlop at 10:07 AM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

I don't think we'll ever find a solution to the doping issue. Once more world records are up for grabs, we'll find more people experimenting with substances on the edge of illegality in order to get that slight advantage over their peers. It's like we need to test all athletes daily for a year preceding international competitions, store their samples indefinitely, and retest every time the definition of doping changes, to see which records should be thrown out. Then, the only way to ensure a lasting record is to train completely naturally.
posted by mantecol at 11:30 AM on May 7, 2017

Why stop at a single reset when you can have decennial resets? You know, just like comic books and their totally not desperate business model and profit maximization.

A thousand times, this! There is no such thing as a non-doping era of sport. Effectiveness of the dope has certainly improved over time, as has the effectiveness of testing and test evasion.

The absurdity of the new hour record is a great example, really. Wiggins is in the process of going down like Lance right now, yet Tony Rominger road faster on a comparable bike and isn't recognized. The whole process of setting the new hour record was a carefully orchestrated media circus and nothing else. Jens Voigt? Seriously?

Let's face it, it's all just sports entertainment. At least today's Giro stage was entertaining!
posted by Chuckles at 11:31 AM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Rather than a reset I'd like to see something like a 25 year rolling record. That way you could say an athlete was the best of their generation without having to specify which generation. And from a marketing point of view there will always be records up for grabs.
posted by Mitheral at 12:13 PM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

The yearning by for some kind of dope-free purity to sport is so much Victorian-era romantic bullshit. The Cult of Amateurism was invented so that rich white men could be the athletic stars. Professionalism was decreed bad because it allowed the poors and the darks to get field-time.

As long a 1st place = "bigger paycheck than everyone else", there will be doping. Every fucking athlete at the top of their game is doped to the gills on shit authorities just can't test for yet. Why? Because they have rent and bills and daycare to pay for.

Any athlete who says different is a liar. I'm willing to wait until the testing catches up with what they're taking today.

Jack LaLanne said "As long as you're keeping score, there's going to be cheating."

Only fools and romantics believe otherwise.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 12:22 PM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

The dangerous thing about this to me is that it implies that records post-2005 can be trusted, that records set now can be. And there's plenty of reason to believe that is flatly false. We just had Russia caught running a massive fake doping lab at the Olympics, with literal FSB agents opening supposedly sealed sample containers and passing them through an actual hole in the wall to have the urine swapped. Out-of-competition testing has long been a joke in many countries. The biological passport was only fully implemented in 2014, and it still allows for a lot of possibilities in micro-dosing. As Ross Tucker writes, the IAAF, IOC, and WADA have regularly ignored whitleblowers and expressed shock when press investigations have come out revealing scandals. And the lack of serious consequences for Russia for their actions, which I remind you involved literal spies swapping test samples, indicates that the IOC doesn't care.

I realize no line in the sand is going to perfect, but the idea that 2005 is the dividing line for clean sport, or even that it's 2017, is laughable.
posted by zachlipton at 1:02 PM on May 7, 2017 [9 favorites]

I know at men's distance running, there were astonishing records set by people Haile and Bekele and Komen between 95 and 05. I have no strong reason to think any were doping. And there's reason to think Halie and Bekele in particular were once in a generation talents. But I know many do think there were doping.
posted by persona au gratin at 3:20 PM on May 7, 2017

There was no testing available for EPO (the main drug for distance athletes at the time) prior to around 2000, and the testing was easy to evade after that. There is every reason to believe that distance athletes in the 95-05 era were doping. Armstrong's last Tour de France win was 2005 for example.
posted by markr at 4:39 PM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

How about resetting the events themselves?

Example: distances in track events. Add 1% (or whatever) to all track events. Comparing eras becomes a lot less practical. (It's been done before with the conversion from yards to meters.) People would just have to give up the "nice round number" appeal of the 100, 200, and so on. Or keep calling the 100, but now it's the "Modern Era 100."

Field events? Change the shot weight, the discuss size, etc. Long jump/pole vault: limit take off distance to, say, 20 meters. High jump: add a "fair takeoff zone" or some kind of takeoff line.
posted by Caxton1476 at 7:12 AM on May 8, 2017

I am endlessly amused at the "we must REMOVE ALL DOPE from sports!!!" attempts; they seem to be run by people who have no idea how biochemistry works.

There is no such thing as "not chemically-enhanced" athleticism. There's just "enhanced by permitted chemicals" (including sugar, caffeine, proteins, etc.) and "enhanced by not-permitted chemicals." And chasing the not-allowed chemicals is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole; some of that won't even be people trying to dodge the rules, but people looking for currently-ok enhancements that other people don't know about yet.

That said, adjusting the "best ever" numbers to match those that were done under the currently legal set of chemicals sounds like a good way to encourage both athletes and spectators, because it seems pointless to have a "best ever" number that can't be matched under the current rules.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:37 AM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

I know at men's distance running, there were astonishing records set by people Haile and Bekele and Komen between 95 and 05. I have no strong reason to think any were doping.

The setting of astonishing records is the reason to presume doping.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 5:17 PM on May 8, 2017

As I said in the other thread that spawned this: I've never heard anyone suggest Bob Beamon was on PEDs when he jumped nearly two feet beyond the then-current long jump record, and 50 years later his mark is still the Olympic record and only a single person has passed it in international competition. Sometimes an astonishing record is simply a mark of extraordinary human achievement. Sometimes successors struggle to beat it because the person or the moment was just that exceptional.

I'm not really down with wiping those moments out, even if it takes out some cheaters too. Plus, as others have said, the pretense that somehow we've totally wiped out the use of PEDs is just that, a pretense.
posted by tavella at 9:51 AM on May 9, 2017