Masters Track News and Muse

Age-Graded Tables: tanned, rested and ready, eventually

Rex Harvey is used to multi-tasking. After all, he once excelled at the decathlon. (He competed in the 1976 Olympic Trials and in 1991 set a still-standing world M45 age-group record in the 10-event grind.) But his ability to juggle chores was no match for a couple criminals at the Holiday Inn Express in Long Island, New York. Ready to fly home to Cleveland from a business trip on May 6, 2003, Harvey was checking out at the airport motel when he asked someone to keep an eye on his luggage.

Harvey says: “The bag was sitting six feet away, directly in front of someone…. It was a pair working, as one asked a question over the shoulder of the watching person while the other one snatched.”

Gone were $6,500 in digital cameras, modems –– and two laptop computers. Value of the IBM and Sony laptops: No huge matter. Value of their contents: priceless.

Gone were the Age-Graded Tables –– and the only backup copy.

“It was a disaster,” says Harvey, who as vice president-stadia of World Masters Athletics led the international team that put in thousands of hours to produce a long-awaited (and long-demanded) revision of the 1994 Age-Graded Tables, or AGT.

The AGT is the magic decoder ring of masters track. Its only official purpose is to help determine scores in multi-events such as the decathlon, heptathlon and weight pentathlon.

Unofficially, the tables are used by meet directors and road-race organizers worldwide to decide whether, say, a 80-year-old woman’s 9-minute mile is superior to a 40-year-old man’s 4:30. Prize money is often at stake. Hy-Tek meet management software boasts the tables. And even more important –– athletes use them to compare themselves against both their own younger-day marks and other masters’ efforts.

Harvey’s laptops contained huge Excel files with single-age world records for all track and field events plotted on a curve. Fortunately, Harvey the night before the theft had e-mailed the men’s running data to Norm Green, a long-distance-running champion and U.S. masters official. But the women’s data and jumps and throws had to be reconstructed by team members in Sweden, Germany, Holland, Spain and Britain and elsewhere.

Although the “combined-event” factors –– for scoring the decathlon –– were safe, the individual-event charts beloved by the rank-and-file were not expected to be published until this spring.

How valuable are the tables?

“Enormous,” says Howard Grubb, a lecturer in applied statistics at the University of Reading in Britain. “All the comments suggest that the AGT really help masters athletes measure their performances … and so keep them competitive.”

Grubb, in fact, created an online form that incorporates the AGT and allows athletes to plug in their age, event and performance –– and see how they rate against an open-class standard.

“I think the concept of the tables and the calculations are fantastic,” Grubb says. “It’s easy to quibble with the details, but in general they’re a brilliant idea.”

Grubb made his comments before the release of the latest AGT –– the third in a series since their inception by the World Association of Veteran Athletes (now WMA) in 1989. The latest tables take into account the hundreds of world age bests set since 1994.

But the delay in publishing the tables has affected records as well, says Phil Raschker, the 2004 Sullivan Award finalist from Georgia who has set dozens of them.

“Now we have a great mess on our hands,” Raschker says. “And it is not only in the individual events but also with the multis, since the USA scored the nationals for some time on the old (tables) when others used the new (tables). We are having world and American records that presently are a mix-match.”

Suzy Hess, publisher of National Masters News, said in an e-mail note Jan. 31, 2005: "Rex is still working on the data for the new AGT. I have the printer all lined up and we are ready to go with production as soon as Rex is."

Harvey has said that the WMA Web site also will post the tables.

Stan Perkins, an Australian expected to run for the presidency of WMA in August, was philosophical:

“The delay in releasing the tables is unfortunate as they are well-used by athletes and administrators around the world…. I guess this sort of problem is the Achilles’ heel of computers…. I feel sure that Rex would continue to feel devastated by his loss.”

Posted by kenstone at February 1, 2005 4:10 PM