The Masters Athlete Series: Consistent Age-Grading Across Disciplines with One Number

Making performances comparable across disciplines is a problem faced by multi-sports like Modern Pentathlon and the Decathlon/Heptathlon in athletics but also in swimming with its many distances and strokes.

Both scoring systems, in Modern Pentathlon and in the Decathlon/Heptathlon, are somewhat inelegant and logically inconsistent and result in biases for the overall results: the Modern Pentathlon favors the best runner and fencer, the Decathlon/Heptathlon by the best sprinter.

How Do Swimmers Calculate a Score to Compare a 1,500m Freestyler with a 100m Butterfly Swimmer?

The scoring system in swimming is called the FINA point system and it indeed has many advantages:

• First, it is simple to explain and can be described by a single formula of P = 1000*(B/T)³ with P being your points, B the base time and T your swim time
• Also, it is continuously updated and anchored in an objective fashion as the base time is the current world record for the stroke and distance (it equals the base time and therefore 1000 points)
• Last but not least, the cubic function reflects that it gets ever harder to improve the closer you get to world record times

To every swimmer, these points are meaningful and oftentimes used for selection to teams. Given the exponential function and 1000 points being the current world record, 600 points already are national level (and around the qualifying times for the German National Championships) and with 300 points you can compete at the local/regional level.

How Can We Use the FINA Point Concept in Masters Sports?

It is only a short step to extend the concept beyond swimming in two directions:

1. Extend it to other activities where the fastest wins as measured by time (like running)
2. Extending it to Masters Athletes by simply applying the appropriate age-group world record to calculate your points

Why Calculate a Single Point Score for Your Masters Performance?

The single best reason for calculating a score for yourself is that you know that you get slower over time as you age – the thing that you do not know though is by how much you should get slower. In other words, are you getting better with time relative to your age? Even if we are competing as Masters Athletes and can count our places in official races, participation and competitiveness across age categories is not even and therefore no substitute for a longitudinal comparison with yourself.

The second reason is that many of us tend to do more than one distance within a sport (e.g., 400m, 800m, mile and 5k) or more than one sport (e.g., swimming and running). If we want to be honest with ourselves, it would be good to know not only which one of these we like best, but where our weaknesses are. A single point scoring system will do exactly that and allows us to properly allocate our trainings resources.

Does it work?

Here is an example comparing 100m freestyle swimming and running a mile, just to pick two distances in two different sports with varying contributions of oxidative metabolism.

To be honest, I was really surprised as to how well it works. If I swim a 70sec in the 100 freestyle at the peak of my lifetime performance, I am barely able to compete as a male in local, senior competitions but am (somewhat) fine as a female athlete if we take the 300 points as a cut-off point. This roughly equates to a 6min mile which seems about right with its 344 (female) and 238 (male) „FINA“ points respectively – nothing to write home about but much better than the average population.

So how about aging my performance: being in the early fifties, I would have to run a 6m28s in the mile for 300 points which I can do. On the other hand, I would have to swim a 1m17s in the 100m free which I certainly cannot. Given that I am a much worse swimmer than runner and have never competed in a pure swimming event this result seems intuitively correct.

What is the Potential for this Relative Age-Grading System Across Sports?

There are two applications that come to my mind (other than its potential to greatly improve the scoring system in multi-sports like the Modern Pentathlon).

First, it would allow for crowning an overall winner in sparsely attended masters competitions for the highest „FINA“ point score rather than the fastest time. In my humble experience, it often is the case that for many of the smaller and more regional events and starting at a certain age, you might be winning a medal just for showing up (or on the side of the spectrum end up in the only two truly competitive categories of male-midlife-crisis-age-groupers).

Secondly, it would of course be possible to do the same thing we just did for masters athletes for youth development purposes. Taking youth world records as the basis, you would be able to have an objective longitudinal score that allows you to see if an athlete actually improves over time relative to their age. Normally, youth coaches tend to be overly impressed by themselves because all athletes get better as they grow (just like all masters athletes get slower as they age). Unfortunately, competitive sports are not really popular and all but the very best performing young athletes tend to drop out over time (not only in niche sports like the Modern Pentathlon but even in previously much more popular sports like track). If you are the exceptional young athlete who is both average but has not yet dropped out, you get the (very wrong) impression that instead of getting better you are actually getting worse in an ever more narrow field. This of course creates a vicious cycle of more young people becoming discouraged and dropping out, leading to the current situation where you barely have any competition below the very top. Having a lifelong, age-graded scoring system would allow the coach and athlete to actually monitor absolute (compared to yourself) rather than relative (compared to the competition) improvements in performance to encourage continued participation in competitive sports.