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IAAF Rankings dead and gone?
65 posts
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IAAF Rankings dead and gone?
I just noticed that the IAAF Rankings are no longer listed on the website. Did they discontinue this feature? I noticed before that they had screwed up the point entry for the Super Grand Prix competitions this year. They were only scored as regular Grand Prix meets. It was a flawed system, but still had some interest and relevance so I hope they bring it back in some form.
The former URL is still operational, however, and the Rankings show updated through the 13th.
http://www.iaaf.org/worldrankings/index.html (aka, why it's good, if you like something, you're always better to bookmark it than to rely on navigation through somebody's home page... even after things "disappear," they are frequently still there.)
Confirmed that they are dead:
http://www.iaaf.org/news/Kind=2/newsId=40311.html
At the IAAF Press Commission meeting last fall, which had a couple of dozen leading track journalists from as many different countries in attendance, they polled the room as to the usefullness of the IAAF Rankings, and they didn't get a single strong vote of confidence. Suspect that helped put the final nail in.
(I would proudly--and unashamedly--also note that virtually everyone at the table said the only Rankings of any real merit were T&FN's.  )
Wow - I am impressed that the IAAF actually realized their mistake. Since as gh said, they do like the T&FN rankings, how 'bout they give it another shot, doing it T&FN's way? There's enough 'experts' in the IAAF's ken that they could do it. I'd love to see some meaningful seasonal rankings, updated biweekly perhaps. We could generate 100 posts in a heartbeat, quiibbling them all, and that would be a GOOD thing!
so what happens to all those shoe contracts that give bonus money based on their IAAF rank? (Or so I've heard)
I can't speak to that, but I do know that a singificant number of people have performances based on the T&FN rankings.
No, I didn't say the IAAF liked our Rankings. I said journalists on the Press Commission do. Not remotely the same thing.
I thought that the IAAF rankings were interesting in comparison with T&FN's. They attempted to reward longevity over less frequent, but superior, performances. In some cases, the same cream rose in both pots. It was always interesting to see where they did not, though.
The beauty of the T&FN rankings has always been that they reward performance over a set period of 1 year. Each year represents a clean slate.
Only a matter of time before the voting members get invites as 'special' guests to various sporting events and, of course, complimentary gifts. Can your team ignore the spoils?
I also found the IAAF rankings to be interesting, but in need of some modification. Some of the flaws in opinion could be fixed, though. The combined events scores should really be taken into account for more than 12 months since most athletes compete in very few complete dec's or hep's in one year. The placing score was very uneven between the different types of competition and some leveling there would help make the system more relevant. Also, women's scores seemed to be set approximately 20 points lower than men's score on average. Some disciplines seemed to yield disproportinally high scores as well. Of course this would only be relevant in the overall ranking of athletes.
Some form of "neutral" ranking score which spans at least a year's worth of performances would be of interest, so I hope that IAAF finds a way of modifying the system and brings it back in a way that may gain more traction.
Oops. my bad. But now that the IAAF is out of the business, perhaps someone could use the T&FN methodology (assuming T&FN is too busy itself to do it) to come up with a 'better mousetrap' to serve the world's real fans (all 112 of us). Since the journalists 'like' it, they could hype it and put it out, like the NCAA football/basketball/CC, etc. rankings.
Happy to say that in almost 60 years of Rankings there has never been (to my knowledge) a single instance of anybody trying to suborn a Panel member. Threaten perhaps!
I got it wrong. I knew that. I shouldn't start drinking at 11am anymore.
I'm glad the rankings are gone. It was a nice idea that was poorly presented. There were far too many differences between events and the performance tables were quite unfair to certain events, where WRs barely got you into the Top 100 overall. It would have been far better to redo the tables each year and make 1000 pts be the WR from the previous year, but I digress.
Now, maybe USATF will follow suit and stop using them for the Visa Series, where the same inequalities prevent great performances from achieving the proper rankings and recognition.
Dumb stuff like this never works.
In horse racing they instituted this a few years ago and nobody pays any attention to it, except for those people who are left off the list. Formula's don't work, even for anal track nuts.'' Thank God they have been shit canned.
At the risk of being laughed off the board... what, pray tell am I doing wrong - I can't find current rankings on the T&FN site - when I hit the rankings link, most recent I can see are 5 years old.
The IAAF Rankings attempted to emulate tennis (or golf). IMHO, that's just plain and simple a non-starter for our sport. We've got sharply defined season, with people going for peaks. Yes, tennistas and golfers might have a sharper focus for one of the majors, but it's not the same thing; they're truly on an eternal calendar. Track rankings that incorporate anything from the previous year (indeed, from anything more than a couple of months old) are inherently flawed and doomed to mean little. Thus, T&FN has zero interest in trying to produce any "current" rankings, as commercially popular as it might be. As you say, we go the clean-slate route. We stand back at the end of the calendar year and make a judgment on what happened in that period. Terribly old-media in this give-it-to-us-now era, but it's what we've always done. And we're happy with it. Should anybody ever decide to revive "real-time rankings," the IAAF's model is actually quite good, once you remove the political bias (insignificant-area meets get high points simply in the name of geographical expediency), and add a coefficient that realizes that every event in a given meet isn't created equal. Under the existing IAAF system, the Kenyan Championships 100 got the same value as the U.S. champs, which is nuts; equally nuts the other way was that the steeples got the same value. Wrong!
The other major flaw in the IAAF Rankings was their failure to recognise that at any given meet each event was not equal. There needed to be some "head-to-head" component (as the TFN rankings considers).
So, if Johnny Sixpack beats Asafa Powell then Johnny should get some sort of bonus irrespective of whether the meet is in Zurich or Djibouti. If the Oslo Grand Prix puts on a 200m race and only dudes with 20.70 PRs race, then that's a dud race with few points up for grabs. As for how you work all this out I have no idea. I must say, I did used to look at the rankings each time they came out, but I stopped looking at the overall rankings pretty quickly. In the same way that I've never really bought the whole TFN AOY thing, the notion of trying to compare apples and hamburgers really didn't appeal.
I believe in both soccer and chess they use ranking systems where points are scored based on the ranking score of your competitors. You get fewer points for beating someone ranked lower than you do when beating someone with a higher rank. Adding something like this to the IAAF formula would certainly make it more relevant and interesting.
the other problem was that many of the big/high scoring meets never held certain events, therefore the female JT for example had little chance of scoring big points this led to the annomally f having 3 400h in the top 10 overall and osliedys menedez lanquishing in the 70's despite setting a WR !!!
I will say, though, that 3 years out of 4 (except the one without WC/OG, where IAAF system gave too much weight to Euros, Commonwealth), if you looked at the IAAF Rankings between seasons (i.e., at same time the T&FN ones came out) you'd find a very high level of correlation. For all the ongoing stumbles, they pretty much got it right in most events.
Would it be hard to maintain a Top10-20 for each event on a weekly or monthly basis using some sort of rigorous criteria?
For example (using monthly context and running as an example): - What were the highest quality races of the past month? (as determined by some algorithm that captures depth (in terms of (i) performances in the race, and (ii) quality of performers going into the race) - Who won said races? - Who beat who? - What other performances of note should be considered ? (i.e. fast performances in minor races, wins in minor races, wins over higher ranked performers) Is this feasible? Worthwhile?
yes and yes. but they have to be felxible enough to hone the criteria to get it right. It seems they have tons of data from all the recent years to play around with the algorithm and get it right.
Aye, and there's the rub. It would be a lot of work, for the enjoyment of a relatively small number of hard-core fans, but it might work, if it were broken down into 'areas' (1-2-4; 8-15; St-5-10-Mar; 110H-400H; Jumps; Throws) and a different group/committee worked in each area. You could probably do it with as few as three very knowledgeable 'experts' in each area. I'd even imagine that these 'experts' would LIKE to do it. It would probably take oversight from the IAAF to be considered 'legit', unlike the American system of haaving sportwriters and/or coaches vote, especially since T&FN doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with it (if I read gh's response correctly).
I suspect the IAAF feels that it must serve its broader community (of member associations) by having ranking lists that go 50-100 athletes deep for each event.
This no doubt leads to the reliance on a garbage 'scale' that would be unnecessary at the top end,,,
No matter what you do, all performance results in approved competitions by all athletes need to be entered in order to correctly track up and coming athletes. The size of the actual list that is published may vary, but why not include top 100??? The easiest approach to all this, would be to take the IAAF system and make some adjustments to it. One way could be to add a point value of 10% of the difference in ranking point to the higher ranking athlete that someone beats. No extra points for beating someone with a lower rank. Also, adjust the tables for individual events to make them more equitable for inter-discipline comparisons if you want to continue that practice.
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