STOP PRESS – please note optimization of the indexes has led to some dramatic speed enhancements.

STOP PRESS 2 – I’ve now added age-grading. Thanks to Howard Grubb for advice. Some distances (eg 2000m steeple-chase) and non-standard age/throw weight combinations are not covered. Of course, if an athlete’s date of birth is not in our database we can’t calculate the age-graded performance! I’ve checked the calculations carefully and thanks to Urban Bettag for further checking. But please let me know of any problems.

Howard Grubb has an excellent website explaining the principles of age-grading, providing the raw data used for our results, and even gives you a little calculator. See:

http://www.howardgrubb.co.uk/athletics/

I am pleased (not to say, extremely relieved) to announce the launch of the first version of our online track and field results database. A lot of work has gone into this over the past 6 months and special thanks should go to Lars Menken for ideas, advice and data entry, Miguel Branco for data entry, and Derek Paterson for data validation.

The idea of the database is similar to that for road running, except of course each meeting can contain multiple results for each athlete, and there are complications with different weights of throws etc. As for road running, we have also developed an Excel front-end to allow for the off-line entry of results.

The database can be accessed at:

http://www.serpentine.org.uk/rdb/trackfield/welcome.php

Yes, I know there are a number of outstanding issues, most of all speed and a number of results still to be coded and fully validated. We think we have entered all the personal and club bests but we also know there are likely to be some still out there. And yes, we know some of the results still contain errors. Subject to volunteer effort, we would like to record all track and field results but this will be a very large task indeed. Entering and checking the 4600 individual results and 1700 relay results
has been difficult enough.

Only the first version? There are a few planned upgrades to this database as well as resolving the few outstanding results for which to identify location, date, etc.

* Speed – changing the way bests are calculated and stored to improve the response time (now done)
* Relays – better handling eg of mixed sex relays (not yet done), ensuring the correct order is displayed at all times (now done)
* Split up of female, male results (now done)
* Better linking with the My Results page (not yet done)
* in the very long term we wish to explore age graded results (now done)

I would hope some of these issues can be resolved within the next few months.

Please report any queries or apparent errors with full explanation to me. But I will take a break from this work for a bit so any changes may take some time. After all, there’s an AGM coming up …

Further info.