Monday, December 27, 2004

IAAF's review of Race Walking in 2004 More a rehash than anything revealing...apart from the new to me information that Denis Nizhegodorov's 3:35 50km in June wasn't counted as a WR by IAAF due to lack of EPO testing - which was not a condition in place for records so far I'm aware. Even so, he was clearly the number two walker at 50km. In places the stats quoted by A. Lennart Julin and Mirko Jalava counter their own somewhat spurious analysis: "The race walkers are competing almost as sparingly as the marathon runners but in stark contrast the top walkers tend to face each other not just at the international championships but almost whenever competing." - that just means there's a smaller circuit of races; Men - "Overall, the discipline is ruled by a very small group of just four nations. In the Olympics it was POL, RUS, RUS, CHN, ESP, POL, POL, ESP, RUS and CHN for the top-10!" - I suppose what they're referring to is Olympic finishers at 50km. According to Emmerich Goetze for 20km there are 7 nationalities represented in the top 10 ranking times (RUS x 5, ECU, POL, AUS, ESP, CHN) . For 50km there are four nations (RUS x 4, POL, CHN x 3, ESP) . At the Olympics the finishing order by nationalities were: 20km - ITA, ESP, AUS , ECU, ESP, CHN, RUS, GER, LAT, POR & 50km - POL, RUS, RUS, CHN , ESP, POL , POL, ESP , RUS, CHN. So the 20km is more diverse than 50km - but shows is that the 50km result matched the rankings - to counteract the spurious point that "But there are also similarities with the marathon as the correlation between statistics and the Olympic outcome is weak. " It's not important to us perhaps, but to counter the repeated error for future Google searches, Wang Liping was competing in 2003 - it seems she gave birth in in 2002 or early 2003 as by September 2003 she was competing at high level. Incidentally, the German statistician Emmerich Goetze produces more complete rankings than Mirko Jalava, who for some reason favours women's walk results over men's. You would expect however that they would have had sight of the IAAF rankings. 4:25:01 PM     comment []

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