Decathlon Scoring Tables - 1934 Scoring Tables

1934 Scoring Tables

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.