As most coaches would know, in determining eligibility for youth or
junior championships, the IAAF considers the age of the athlete to be
based on the year, not the date of birth. Thus, a competitor born on
January 1, 1992 and one born on December 31 are both considered to be
17 years old throughout the 2009 indoor and outdoor seasons.
It seems to me unfair to have to compete in an age class with an
opponent nearly a year older, and I’m not sure why IAAF adopted this
strategy. Perhaps some reader knows the arguments for this and can
offer clarification.
Last month, when I posted best heights for female vaulters ages 12 to
17, I used the actual age on the day the height was accomplished.
Since this involved visually comparing date of birth with date of
competition for some 1200 instances, at least I came away with an
appreciation of how much simpler it would be to do this sorting on
the IAAF definition of age.
Yesterday, in a moment of idle curiosity, I wondered what was the
best height in the 2008 outdoor season for male vaulters of each age.
This time, I chose to use the IAAF definition of the year of birth,
rather than the date of birth and date of competition. That made it
possible just to use the “find” function of the computer to sort for
the highest mark in each birth year. What had taken perhaps fifty
hours to summarize the women’s list took less than one hour for the
men’s.
The result might be of interest to some readers:
2008 Outdoor Men’s Best Height for Year of Birth
1967 – Jeff Hartwig USA 5.70
1968 – Andrei Fedotov MDA 5.10
1970 – Riaan Botha RSA 5.20
1972 – Derek Miles USA 5.85
1973 – Laurens Looije NED 5.32
1974 – Alex Averbukh ISR 5.55
1975 – Viktor Chistyakov RUS 5.60
1976 – Toby Stevenson USA 5.50
1977 – Danny Ecker GER 5.75
1978 – Denys Yurchenko UKR 5.83
1979 – Pavel Gerasimov RUS 5.80
1980 – Spas Buhalov BUL 5.70
1980 – Dachi Sawano JPN 5.70
1981 – Brad Walker USA 6.04
1982 – Steve Hooker AUS 6.00
1983 – Maksym Mazuryk UKR 5.82
1984 – Mark Hollis USA 5.75
1985 – Yevgeniy Lukyanenko RUS 6.01
1986 – Malte Mohr GER 5.76
1987 – Hiroki Ogita JPN 5.56
1988 – Jan Kudlicka CZE 5.70
1989 – Raphael Holzdeppe GER 5.80
1990 – Nico Weiler GER 5.30
1991 – Cheyne Rahme RSA 5.20
1992 – Nariharu Matsuzawa JPN 5.10
1993 and following – no vaulters at or over 5.00m, the lower limit of
Mirko Jalava’s world deep list <tilastopaja.org> that I used as my
data source.
