When is a record not a record?
When I was a budding track nut in the late 1960s, I knew all the world records by heart. They didn't change much. Jim Ryun's 3:51.1 mile and Valeriy Brumel's 7 foot, 5 3/4-inch high jump seemed written in stone. At least in this Stone's imagination.
Now I've seen those records fall, and hundreds more. I can't conjure all the track WRs anymore. But I'm supremely confident I can find them if need be. A good almanac and a hundred Web sites all agree that the current mile record is 3:43.13 and the high jump WR is 8-0 1/2.
But when you ask me the American W40 indoor record for 800 meters -- as a gentleman who works for ESPN did recently -- I have to cough and apologize for a long-winded reply. Do you want the "listed" record or the "real" record? (He had asked for the "accepted" record.) The question came before last weekend's AT&T USA National Indoor Track & Field Championships in Boston, which ESPN taped for Sunday showing.
Alisa Harvey, 42, was on a record streak -- and had qualified for the elite USA nationals, and I told the ESPN guy that the best indoor 800 by a women 40 to 44 was her 2:07.08 from late January at Penn State. But the W40 indoor record listed by USA Track & Field was Alisa's own 2:07.23 from 2006. On Saturday, however, Alisa lowered her January mark to 2:06.08. And in the finals Sunday, she took sixth in yet another AR: 2:05.75 -- which virtually assures that she'll compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials this coming June in Eugene, Ore.
With dozens of events and 14 five-year age groups (from 35-39 to 100-plus), Masters track has hundreds of age-group indoor and outdoor records. And even though few can be termed "soft," they are broken with incredible regularity. So the official Web sites of Masters track can't be blamed for not always listing recent bests.
But in my 12 years as a close observer of Masters track, I've come to realize that dozens of official American and world records are nonsense. By that I mean: They don't recognize true Masters bests. Many legitimate marks set in officially sanctioned meets (including the Olympics!) should be listed as Masters age-group records -- but aren't.
On my Web site and blog (click here to visit www.masterstrack.com), I've chronicled dozens of examples of genuine age-group bests ignored by the record books. Sometimes, official Web sites don't even agree on a world record.
Five years ago, I compared a set of Masters bests (men 40-and-up, and women 35-39 and women 40-and-up) prepared by Peter Matthews of Britain with the official records maintained by WMA, the governing body of world Masters track.
My finding: They agreed on a meager 57 percent of the records.
Peter Matthews is the editor of a world-renowned statistical annual put out by the Association of Track and Field Statisticians and chairs the National Union of Track Statisticians in the UK. He doesn't mess around.
So if almost half the records in his compilation disagree with WMA in just three age groups, what hope do we have for the other 25 age groups (men and women combined)?
This is not an esoteric question for Masters geeks.
Such questions as "Who's the fastest? The best jumper? The farthest thrower?" are part of the human condition -- and a constant query by fans, sportswriters and athletes themselves.
So my heart falls every time I see a record ignored -- or the converse: a mark elevated to record status it doesn't deserve.
The latest examples?
I posted this on my blog over the weekend:
"Running in the rain, Joe King, 81, clocked a mile Saturday in 7:13.25. That beats the listed M80 world record of 7:16.16 by Canada's Hans Weickhardt in 1994 and the listed AR of 7:36.55 by John Hosner in 2006. However, 80-year-old John Keston ran 6:48.3 in May 2005 -- a mark that created a buzz for change in USATF rules. (Rules were eventually changed, but his mark was not grandfathered.) . . . . I also notice that Pat Manson's 5.36-meter (17 feet, 7 inches) pole vault mark at Reno is now listed as the M40 world indoor record -- even though Jeff Hartwig's M40 season best of 5.70 (18-8 1/4) is listed by the IAAF. I guess the record application is still on a boat from Stuttgart."
In the case of the Joe King mile, the meet Web site listing his time had "NWR" next to the clocking. New World Record. It wasn't. But who can tell? In the case of Hartwig's vault, it was too recent to process.
But most of the record anomalies involve performances that long ago should have been resolved, including the milestone first 7-foot high jump by a 40-year-old.
In January 2005, I recounted in excruciating detail how Glen Conley's clearance of 7-0 5/8 in August 1997 at the Empire State Games was relegated to the trash heap of history. Today, the listed M40 world and American record remains Jim Barrineau's 6-11 from 1995.
Conley's historic 7-footer wasn't completely ignored, however.
In late 1997, the USATF Masters Track & Field Committee voted Conley's jump "Masters Track and Field Performance of the Year."
Just don't ask why it's not a record.
Tags: Records
