Embarrassed by your Olympic javelin: did cavemen do it better? (2012)
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Yes, the permanent world record is a little unfortunate. But it has nothing to do with how cavemen would throw.
Standards must be made to judge fair competition among participants. Yes, they're a little bit arbitrary - the 100M dash could very well be a 106M dash. But that wouldn't make the athletes 6% more impressive. Likewise, we could improve our javelins every year to get further and further throws. But our global interest isn't on the throw, but the thrower.
Why? The longer you keep records, the less likely it is that you can exceed the previous record. Why would we expect javelin throws to get longer over time?
That's a completely separate concern. Once records are established for the current event, you still expect them to be more or less permanent. Turning in the best performance in all of history is not an attainable goal. You can't expect it to be one.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/29/olympic-...
> in 1986 the International Association of Athletics Federations' technical committee authorized a new javelin design. The center of gravity was moved 1.6 inches forward, the tip was modified to make the javelin less aerodynamic, meaning it would nose down earlier and land sooner, reducing average flight distance by about 10 percent.
The permanent WR is unfortunate in that it was engineered. It would be like moving the 100 m to an incline of 12% and calling it the same sport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer#Marketing_and_result...
I’d also argue there is a difference between rules about equipment and rules about technique. Technique rules may have to be adjusted more often because if an athletes does something unusual that is within the current rule set but may be seen as advantageous, you have to make a decision.
With equipment you can just say no. Those Nike running shoes are banned, full body swim suits are banned. The javelin is just another ban. With equipment, it also effects athletes uniformly, everyone must change to the new equipment. So no one is unfairly penalised.
Why do the records need to fall?
part of the competition part would be breaking records.
Things like better shifters, lighter frames (within reason) more aero parts (within reason) are still allowed.
The UCI's 6.8kg weight limit is much higher than what is achievable with modern materials. So much so that there are frame builders who can build you an "illegal" bike made out of _steel_: https://www.rodbikes.com/catalog/outlaw/outlaw-main.html
With a minimum limit, no one feels the need to make their bikes less than perfectly strong. And when every OEM is making frames at perfect strength under the limit, they drop it.
I doubt that any pro-cyclist wants the speed advantages of one if it means that cornering is more difficult, veering into dangerous.
I am also pretty confident that the 'manoeuvrability' disadvantage is completely irrelevant for any individual track event. And do you think that it would be an important factor for time trials?
[edit] And yes, for time trials recumbents would be nice, but already time-trial bikes are pretty different and unsafe, I don't think the UCI would allow even more risk.
Maneuverability is important for time trials. Most courses have several tight turns and crashes are common.
We could easily design javelin that travels much further, but choose not to, due to safety concerns and limitations venues...
Sounds like they just used it to wrap around the javelin to give it a spin like you would a spinning top with a string.
1. https://sportstar.thehindu.com/olympics/tokyo-olympics/neera...
2. https://thebridge.in/athletics/tokyo-olympics-neeraj-chopra-...
3. https://www.newindianexpress.com/sport/olympics/2021/aug/08/...
Whilst we could standardise a javelin, we can’t recreate the culture, diet, stadia etc of bygone epochs, so the comparisons will always be qualified or debased.
It is frustrating that we don’t have time machines,but perhaps that’s a reason to think further about what it is that fascinates us about athletic and sporting contests.
By freeform here I mean that you remove most of the rules. For example for biking you could allow whatever vehicle the competitors choose so long as it is powered entirely by the cyclist.
Not sure what a reasonable "freeform" ruleset would be for javelin, at some point javelins stop being javelins and start being model airplanes, but I can see some entertainment value in "throwing model airplanes as far as possible"competitions too..
The World Human Powered Vehicle Association [1] oversees such competition, on land, in water, and even in the air [2].
I’m not sure if there are similar things in other sports, but with Moths and foiling boats, there are plenty of people who say this isn’t real sailing. Fun to watch, though.
So why are we so much worse than 25 years ago? The obvious explanation would doping.
I was unable to find a clip of his throws in YouTube, but here's a Google Translated article from a Finnish newspaper: https://bit.ly/3xvZWMk.
His 97.76 was in 2020 in Poland.
I suggest avoiding terms like "TFA", which can be taken to insult someone's reading comprehension. I'm sure that's not what you intended but it can easily be misinterpreted.
What does his claim[1] have to do with knowing who the throwers are?
FWIW, I think that, if you look at a sport and find that the performance of athletes in that sport decreased significantly after the introduction of more comprehensive drug testing, then it is not unreasonable to assume the higher performance was due to drug-related enhancements.
[1] He's just making a point about the statistics. We don't need to know the name of the data points.
The issue is the premise is incorrect. 11 of the top 20 throws ever happened since 2015:
https://www.worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/thr...
This suggestion is related to to for why the claim matters, which is familiarity with the sport (as represented by the ability to name its participants). As a longtime participant in track and field, athlete, coach, and fan, I have invariably found that people reduce perceived phenomena to doping usually have no idea what's actually going on in the sport and aren't involved in it in any substantive way. So, "show your familiarity" is a jabby heuristic to prove the point.
Mistaken about what? That the assumption of doping is not unreasonable? After all, I didn't say the assumption of drug-use was likely correct, I said that the assumption itself is not unreasonable.
> So, "show your familiarity" is a jabby heuristic to prove the point.
Being involved in the subjects (say, by following their career?) is evidence of bias when drawing conclusions from data points.
In other words, the heuristic is actually the other way around - if you're "familiar" with the subjects you're the wrong person to be drawing conclusions from the statistics.
It's why we insist on double-blind trials for some things - the researcher has to be ignorant of the subjects involved. Being familiar with them means the conclusions are invalid.
This isn't true.
There are 10 different athletes who have thrown within 7m of the world record[1] and Johannes Vetter has thrown over 94m 4 times[2].
> So why are we so much worse than 25 years ago?
We aren't
> The obvious explanation would doping.
Zelezy was a freak - as can be seen by his progression[3].
That kind of long-lived high performance (82m in 1986, 86m in 2006) is rarely because of doping - there are too many chances to get caught, and it's too hard to transition between doping types (eg steroids to HGH), and historical testing catches out too many people.
The Men's discuss OTOH... This is what a suspicious progression looks like[4].
[1] https://www.worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/thr...
[2] https://www.worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/thr...
[3] https://www.worldathletics.org/athletes/czech-republic/jan-z...
[4] https://www.worldathletics.org/athletes/germany/jurgen-schul...
One day his record will be broken. But the density of his high performing throws will always be amazing.
Sergey Bubbka is perhaps the closest analogy, although his record was recently - finally - broken.
Take for example Usain Bolt, he competed in the sprint but if he focused his career on some other less popular athletic sport he probably could have been WR holder there as well.
If you combine this with the fact that it's possible there was more doping in the past (especially 80s), you can get these incredible world records that stand for decades.
Looking at the list of furthest throws[1] this doesn't really seem that obvious at all.
The top two are quite large outliers, with a 4 metre gap to #3, and people in general don't seem to have been throwing much further in the past. Indeed, the difference between #1 and #25 is almost 10 metres, or 10% of the record. That's quite the difference!
Johannes Vetter seems to be in the same league as Jan Železný; Vetter is 28, Železný established his record at the age of 30. It's entirely possible that Vetter will manage to break the record in the future.
So either both Železný and Vetter are exceptionally talented athletes in their field, or they're both doped to the gills without being caught. It's not like there wasn't any attention to this in the past, see e.g. [2] from 1989. There sure is more attention to this now and I suppose it's possible that Železný used doping, but that Vetter exists in the same league as Železný demonstrates that Železný didn't have to be a doping user to be so good at it.
So in short: it's not all that obvious to me looking at the data. It's not like cycling/Tour de France with a long history of doping use (which is partly, I suspect, because what's being asked of riders borders on the inhuman).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_throw#All-time_top_25_...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1989/06/18/in-...
Very unfortunate timing unearthing this right now too given that a great throw by Chopra and the inability of the favourites to perform under the conditions has just given India their first ever olympic gold medal in track and field.
> Lots of athletes come to the Olympics hoping to be the Best Ever. But not javelin throwers. They've been told to dream smaller dreams ("Best Since 1984!") and I think that's a bum deal.
> Why not take this event away from crowded arenas, go someplace safe, design the best flying spear possible, throw it as far as you can, and then whoever breaks the record can say to all spear throwers going back over the ages, "Now I'm Number One, in the truest sense — mine flew further than all of yours!
> That would be true Gold.
Maybe the best design would use a rail-gun as a booster.
And if the goal is to make it go as far as possible, you might want to consider throwing it outside the atmosphere.
And pitch-o-mat 5000 was just a modified howitzer. I agree though, a line should be drawn otherwise you can end up with things going a bit absurd. It's similar to hoe stock-csr and forumla 1 racing draw lines about what things are allowed to be done to the cars.