Record-Board Loitering

Record are made to be broken.

Koch and Bonds: they have more in common than you might think.

That's the underlying assumption that I'm making in this post and, to be honest, it seems like a fairly safe one. Technology and equipment advance over time, training methods are refined, and -- if nothing else -- the greater number of athletes participating in sports should lead to higher performance ceilings. Take a peek at most any record progression (thanks for the link, Bryan) and you'll see what I mean. So what happens when we notice that certain records are starting to look a little old up there on the board? Or better yet, how do we respond when modern athletes -- for all of their advantages -- can't even come close?

To me, the most obvious cases of 'record-board loitering' (as I hereby dub this phenomenon) in sports are in the women's sprint events on the track, where all of the current world records hail from the 1980s. These cases are particularly noticeable because track is a sport where record turnover is generally near-constant. Let's take a look at these records (I'm throwing in the women's 800m because it's that ridiculous), and at how close the world's best times from recent championship years have been to surpassing them:

So yea, it's bad. Which gets us to the central point of this post: drugs. Most followers of track and field have at this point decided to disregard these old records -- in theory if not in practice -- because of the blight of performance-enhancing drugs which tarnishes the accomplishments of Griffith-Joyner, Koch and Kratochvilova.

Or at least they say that's why they're doing it. My point is that I don't think people would be nearly so quick to dismiss these records were they not so out-of-reach to track and field's current generation of stars. This is an interesting thought, but it's fairly intuitive. We don't denigrate these tainted athletes just because they cheated; we do it because they were so good at cheating.

For a deeper look into just how insurmountable these marks have proven to be, consider a new table:

Thank you, summer internship, for the Excel expertise.

Before I launch into any kind of statistical analysis, I need to cover my tracks here. The world record is not a random sample, so we can't statistically prove anything about the validity of these marks. Based on my rough approximation of a typical rate of record-breaking, though, we could expect a Z-score (difference divided by standard deviation, or how many standard deviations away from the average world-leading time the world record is) in the 1-2 range. Clearly that is not the case. The world-record marks are all more than two standard deviations less than the recent average. In short, this confirms what we already knew: the record times are really fast and nobody has been close to them.

One interesting thing that this table reveals, though, is just how much Griffith-Joyner's 10.49 and Koch's 47.60 stand out. At nearly six standard deviations off the average, Koch's mark is particularly untouchable. But is it the most outrageous record in sports? Just for fun, I ran a comparison of that record to another controversial sports record that isn't going to be broken any time soon: Barry Bonds' 73 home runs in a single season.

Wow. In this battle of chemically-assisted heavyweights, the embattled slugger comes out on top. It's like the Cold War all over again...

While marks like this represent the upper end of the spectrum of unbreakable records, they are part of a trend of record-board loitering that can be seen wherever PEDs have left their mark on a sport's past. And this trend has consequences, namely a decrease in interest going forward as fans become disheartened by the seemingly-disappointing performances of their generation's stars. Women sprinters have been feeling this crunch for years, and the effect will only become more pronounced in baseball as Bonds' record starts to look older and older.

So there you go. It's called record-board loitering, and the next time you find yourself unimpressed by a 49-second dash or a 50-home run season, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Photos courtesy of The Washington Post and Wikipedia