The Age Graded Tables, a fixture of masters track for two decades, have been revised several times since the 1980s. The currently available version came out in 1994 — about a thousand world age-group records ago. The new AGT were supposed to be out two months ago. WMA Veep Rex Harvey promised me he’d ship the AGT to National Masters News after he returned from San Sebastian. But he still hasn’t found time to make the completed project public.

At least two online AGT forms are based on the 1994 edition (one by Jess Brewer in Canada and another by Howard Grubb in the UK), and both are in desperate need of an update. And an M55 sprinter named Stefan Waltermann has used the 1994 tables in his decathlon scoring site.
Stefan writes:
“Basically, I combined a calculator for decathlon (and pentathlon) with the age grading scoring tables and arrived at a calculator for the decathlon for each year ranging from 40 to 69 years. Just enter your results and you will see your ‘open’ score as well as your age adjusted score with point totals for day one, day two and point totals.
“If you are interested, just … click on the English flag for the English/American website, click on multi events, click on the Decathlon page and continue to the Point System page and the calculator. It sounds like too many steps but trust me, it’s easy. Naturally, folks can download the calculator and use is to dink around. Just don’t use it during the competition, you might get busted!”
Last week, I chatted with Rex Harvey via AOL instant messaging, and he acknowledged his broken promise. He cited his busy life and work (he’s an engineer in Ohio), and advised me to “keep bugging” him. Will do.
But it might help if I weren’t the lone voice in the wilderness.
If you want to see the Age-Graded Tables published in the near future, I encourage you to write Rex at rexjh@aol.com, and make a courteous appeal. Tell him why it’s important that the new tables (based mostly on current world age records) be released sooner than later, or much later.
Rex, remember, is a good guy. Behind the scenes at San Sebastian, he tried mightily to educate the local meet organizers on how to fix problems in meet administration. (His work at the 1997 WAVA meet in Durban, South Africa, is legendary. He and some others saved that meet from certain disaster.)
A few months back, I wrote a piece for Geezerjock magazine about the delayed Age Graded Tables.
Here it is:
Updated age-graded tables set to arrive — but not at record pace
By Ken Stone
It appeared at press time that the updated age-graded tables for Masters track and field, created by World Masters Athletics, would become available in September.
Finally.
The revised tables, which were last updated in 1994, faced many obstacles – including the theft of the only existing revisions — before being completed this summer.
Rex Harvey, the WMA’s vice president-stadia, led the international team that produced long-awaited revision of the tables. He had hoped to make the tables public in July but said in late August that the updated tables would be shipped to publisher National Masters News in early September.
The age-graded tables are the magic decoder ring of Masters track. Calculating the differences between world age-group records, Harvey’s WMA committee developed multiplication factors to allow comparison between age groups. For instance, a 50-year-old man who runs a 12-second 100 meters multiplies his time by .8930 to see an “equivalent” mark for ages 20 to 30, in this case about 10.7 seconds.
The official purpose of the age-graded tables is to help determine scores in multievents such as the decathlon. But unofficially, athletes use the tables to compare themselves against marks set by their own younger selves.
The first tables appeared in 1989 and were revised in 1994. But hundreds of age-group records have been set since then, necessitating a major revision. Part of the reason that the revisions are long delayed is a theft that occurred in Cleveland.
On May 6, 2003, Harvey was checking out of a motel when, among other items, his laptop computers were pilfered. Gone were the age-graded tables – and the only backup copy.
“It was a disaster,” Harvey said. Fortunately, Harvey the night before the theft had e-mailed the men’s running data to Norm Green, a long-distance-running champion and Masters official. But the women’s data on jumps and throws had to be reconstructed.
The snakebit project suffered yet another delay – of nearly six months – when the distance-running subcommittee decided to revisit some world records used to calculate the women’s factors over 1500 meters. The change came because the 2003 theft allowed us more time to review the data and improve the product, Green said.
End of story, but not end of this post.
Rex knows the value of the tables (he led the team that revised them), but he’s stuck on neutral in completing the last few yards. Please join me in cheering him toward the finish line.