Decathlon scoring tables

The scoring tables for the decathlon have undergone continual evolution since their inception about a century ago, with several changes to both the character of the equations and the indices on which the equations are based.

All of the earliest attempts at formalizing decathlon scoring, from the first formal submission (prepared by the U.S. in 1884) until 1915, involved linear scoring equations. The American model was based on world records, but models concurrently used by several Nordic countries were based on their respective national records.

The decathlon was first included in the Olympic Games in 1912, requiring a uniform standard. The first Olympic tables adopted were also linear functions; they were based not on world or national records, but, rather, on the 1908 Olympic records for each of the individual events. The tables were soon updated with the 1912 Olympic records – and the universally disliked extension of event scores to three decimal places was discarded in favor of integer scores – and the tables were used thus in the next four Olympiads.

The rapid evolution of the scoring tables caused results to vary widely. For instance, Akilles Järvinen, the silver medalist in the decathlon in both the 1928 and 1932 Olympics, would have won gold in both years rather handily under most later years' scoring tables.

Beginning in 1920, the IAAF considered, at least, the following criteria for a legitimate decathlon scoring table: (1) The table should reflect the fact that, at higher levels of performance, a unit gain (such as a decrement of 0.01 second in sprint times) is more significant than at lower levels of performance, because of the physiological limitations of the human body. (2) The scores for different events should be comparable, in a manner such that equal skill levels in different events (however difficult it is to define such a concept) are rewarded with equal point levels.

in 1934, the IAAF adopted a new set of scoring tables, proposed by Suomen Urheiluliitto (the Finnish athletics federation), that had already been used for a few years in national competitions in Finland. This scoring system implemented vast changes, with the following features: (1) All of the individual events were scored with Exponential functions, rather than the linear functions that had characterized all decathlon scoring tables to date. For field events, this was a straightforward statistical procedure; for track events, the reciprocal of the athlete's time, representing speed, was used as the independent variable. (2) The tables ranged from 0 to 1150 points per event. Zero points corresponded to the performances of untrained schoolchildren, and 1000-point performances corresponded closely to world records.

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