New sporting record by biggest margin

[Levin]

New sporting record by biggest margin

Reed John wrote: As I recall, for a long time, the high jump was treated like a big hurdle. Then somebody figured out the backwards flop and it revolutionized the event. Not sure what the increase in height was but I'm sure it was dramatic and whatever the record is now is much higher than it would have been if they'd kept doing it the old way.

I thought that as well but the first fosbury flop WR only increased it by 1cm from 2.29 to 2.30.

Edit: Oh dear, deep into wikipedia now reading about the history of different jumping techniques. The biggest difference appears to have been having something soft to land on rather than having to land on your feet.

[Reed John]

New sporting record by biggest margin

Thanks for going down that wiki hole so I didn't have to.

[ursus arctos]

New sporting record by biggest margin

I am old enough to have been taught the Western Roll in middle school.

At high school meets in the mid 70s, it was still common to see both styles in competition.

[Lang Spoon]

New sporting record by biggest margin

Big Boobs and FIRE! wrote:

What was the record before Arbroath 36 Bon Accord 0 in 1885?

Earlier the same day, Dundee Harp had beaten Aberdeen Rovers 35-0. The referee had marked down 37 goals but only 35 scorers. He therefore submitted the lower score. After all, it would only matter if another team were to win 36-0, and the chances of that happening was billions to one.

Those are kick about at school dinner time scores. Had the short passing game appeared yet or was it still a dribble and legal shin destroying hackfest back then? Would have thought it'd be difficult to score a goal every 2 and a bit minutes unless it's a terrible mismatch.

[Sam]

New sporting record by biggest margin

Of course it was a terrible mismatch, that's the whole point.

It's not the world record, though. The world record is AS Adema 149-0 SO l'Emyrne (presumably not counted by those further up the thread because SO l'Emyrne threw the game).

[Levin]

New sporting record by biggest margin

What sport (specifically I guess ones with objective measures) has the largest proportional difference between men's and women's records?

Watching the pole vault qualifiers and the women's record is only 82% of the men's.

But then you can't compare the throwing records either can you as they throw different weights.

[Various Artist]

New sporting record by biggest margin

Sam wrote: Percentage terms for time are going to be tricky, aren't they? A marathon runner can't hope to take as big a percentage off the world record as Bolt did off the 100 metres one. They'd have to beat it by roughly a minute and 24 seconds.
And as I work that out, I discover that Derek Clayton took the marathon world record down from 2:12:00 to 2:09:36.4 in December 1967. 1.14% of two hours and twelve minutes is one and a half minutes.

You've already covered this partially in your second comment there Sam, but I think percentages are the most fair in this kind of mismatched context precisely because what Bolt did to the 100m world record is equivalent to knocking those kind of chunks off a marathon record. The only difference is that both the overall 100m race time and the margin by which Bolt's 9.58 redefined the parameters of the event are simply about seven hundred times shorter. Bear in mind that the 100m best was 'traditionally' only ever reduced in rare tiny increments, notwithstanding drug-fuelled outliers like Ben Johnson's late-'80s performances, and knocking whole tenths off in one go would have been as unthinkable before Bolt came on the scene as someone knocking a minute and a half in this day and age off a marathon record. When pushing the human body to the limits of its performance like that, redefining those limits in the way he has is, absolutely, equally ridiculous.

When you think about it, he briefly upped the rate at which the record was coming down to something like 15 or 20 times faster than its 'normal' progression. Until Asafa Powell became the previous record-holder the – legal – progression went:
Jim Hines 9.95, 1968 - - -> Maurice Green 9.79, 1999
broken by Powell (9.77), 2005, before which there had been a total reduction of only 16 hundredths of a second over 27 years. (Even Hines' was in Mexico City so a bit of an asterisk, though hardly Beamonesque. And it took 17 years for someone to legally go faster than Ben Johnson's infamous 1988 9.79 in Seoul.)

When Bolt first broke the record the more recent progression still read:
Leroy Burrell 9.90, 1991 - - -> Asafa Powell 9.74, 2007
broken by Bolt (9.72), 2008, before which there had been a reduction of only 16 hundredths of a second over 16 years.

Then though:
Asafa Powell, 9.74 -> Usain Bolt 9.72, 2008 -> Usain Bolt 9.69, 2008 -> Usain Bolt 9.58, 2009
= a reduction of 16 hundredths of a second in 14 1/2 months.

As already noted by Satchmo, Michael Johnson's marks in the 200m did something equally cataclysmic – as I recall, he ran something like 19.66 in the Olympic semi-finals immediately before his 19.32, so destroyed the old record twice in a row. The main difference with Bolt, as I see it, is that even achievement's like Johnson's or Bob Beamon's or Mike Powell's, say, tend to be confined at their very upper ends to a single day, or a single competition – viz M. Powell and Carl Lewis between them making half a dozen of the longest jumps in history virtually consecutively in Tokyo '91, none of which have been bettered in quarter of a century since. Usain's truly outstanding feat was to step into territory where he looked for a while like he could do this every time he set foot on a track.

Right then everyone rather took it for granted, because for a year or three there it felt like there were virtually no limits on what he might do – people were suggesting he might take up the 400m and/or the long jump as well, and talking fancifully about him running a 9-second 100m, such was the apparent ease with which he was destroying the previous boundaries of the sport. Remember that pre-Beijing he was mostly considered a promising 200m runner, and his first 100m world record was in only about his third senior race at the distance or something insane like that. (I still vividly remember looking back into his Wikipedia page history at the time of those Olympics when he'd instantly become the most famous sportsman on the planet, and you only had to go back by a relative handful of edits to see it consisting of a handful of paragraphs of text featuring some junior successes and Jamaican record times, a mention or two of him appearing at senior events and making the 2007 world finals, abruptly joined by a line noting his becoming the 100m world record holder – I don't think he had a time under 10 seconds previously – and I think this was before there was even so much as a photo on there.) 'Merely' taking the record down to 9.69 in Beijing transcended a watershed that had long looked way off, and meant he'd moved the mark by 0.05 seconds in a few months instead of a decade or so, despite having only just started taking the event seriously – and] he'd done so while jogging across the line, beating his chest, with his knees up and his shoelaces undone. It wasn't until Berlin that we saw him actually try properly. The fact that his 100m and 200m records set in 2009 have stood now for 7 years and counting does them more justice than people's almost blasé response at the time, arguably, as it shows up the magnitude of those achievements even for a man with the ability of Bolt.

For me, the most impressive recent record-demolition – at least, prior to van Niekirk's, which made my jaw actually hang open – has been Aries Merritt's in the 110m hurdles. That record progression had been frozen in tar since the early 1980s: off the top of my head the progression was something like;
12.93 Renaldo Nehemiah, 1981
12.92 Roger Kingdom, 1989
12.91 Colin Jackson, 1993
= 12.91 Liu Xiao, 2004
12.88 Liu Xiang, 2006
12.87 Dayron Robles, 2008
– which is to say just 6 1/100ths of a second over 31 years up until Merrit broke it in late 2012. (Just checked and edited, it was 1981 and 1989 for the first two, not 1983 and 1987 as I thought, so even longer than I imagined.) His compatriate David Oliver had been the big coming thing for a couple of years and got his best down to 12.89, the third fastest in history, and looked likely to be the next record-breaker, but went off the boil just at the wrong time and we were back to stasis once more for another year or two. Merrit however then shattered it by 7 1/100ths when he suddenly ran 12.80, or about three decades' worth of progression in one remarkable fell swoop.

[Sam]

New sporting record by biggest margin

Yeah VA, as you correctly identify I was answering my own question really, just thought I'd leave my thought process up in the post when I wrote it is all. All the same that's a very interesting post!

[laverte]

New sporting record by biggest margin

This interesting article says that Stella Walsh "lowered the world record for 220 yards by a stunning 2.6 seconds" in April 1930, which would have been by more than 10% (although wikipedia doesn't record this).

[Gangster Octopus]

New sporting record by biggest margin

ursus arctos wrote: I am old enough to have been taught the Western Roll in middle school.

I assume that you, like us, were landing in a sand-pit. I'd imagine that F-Flopping into a sand-pit would be something that you'd want to do on a regular basis...