Hi all, I was browsing LetsRun when I came across this thread from some years back:
https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=7634084&page=6
People were arguing about how difficult / statistically impressive it is for a male to run sub-50 in the 400m in his prime. However, someone in the thread helpfully threw out some HS 400m stats from 2016, so I thought I'd go ahead and extrapolate from those times (and do some statistical tinkering based on other times I'd find on athletic.net and elsewhere) to gather some dubious yet vaguely interesting stats.
I compiled the results in this Desmos notebook:
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bqjc8pmp8x
Don't hold me to anything in here, because they're just rough guesses. Maybe it'll get some more intelligent discussion going, however, and at the very least I hope it's fun to play with the Desmos sliders. Have a field day and leave your insights, opinions, trolling, and hate down below!