Can anyone explain why it isn’t just longest/fastest/highest at each of the events? With scores added up at the end to find the best? Is it to prevent competitors concentrating at some and not bothering with others?

I’m guessing there’s a good reason but I can’t figure out what it is.

7 page Paper on the subject here :

http://www.open.ou.nl/wim/publicationspdf/Redefining%20the%20decathlon%20scoring%20tables.pdf

Oh Jesus…

…great!

I’ll have a read of that later then. 🙂

It’s a bit dry to be honest

But you did ask 😉

But you did ask

Fair comment…

I’ve tried reading these things before and never get past the first few pages. I was hoping someone might explain in slightly simpler terms.

Points are related to achievement relative to a set scale, not relative to the people your competing against, so that different decathlon events can be compared across different times.

Then you can have personal bests, seasons bests and world or championship records all against the same scale.

10 events in each decathlon, each with a possible score of up to about 1000 for achieving a world class time/height/distance – so a possible potential max score of about 10000. for example, 10.4 sec for the 100m gets 1000. Was watching their pole vault today, and every 10cm more in height was worth 30 points, the winner got about 900points for 5.4m.
The WR is about 9000 points total.