Track Graph of the Week

Sifan Hassan debuted in the London Marathon last weekend with a time of 2:18:33. Her run placed her at number 34 on the marathon all time list through last weekend. Many athletes are lucky to end up top 100 all time in a single event but this is Hassan's 9th event that she is currently ranked in the top 100 all time. Her best ranking is her WR in the mile from 2019. Her worst ranking is still a very impressive 71st all time in the 1000m. She is ranked top 20 all time in every event from 1500m to half marathon.

After a very impressive NCAA career, Bowie showed a nice improvement into the professional ranks in 2014 by winning 4 Diamond League races. The following year, she won her first US title and her first global medal; bronze in the 100m. In 2016, she won three Olympic medals in Rio. She was one of only 5 track athletes to win 3 medals at the 2016 Olympics(Felix, Thompson-Herah, Bolt, De Grasse). In 2017, Bowie continued her dominance by winning world championships in the 100m and 4x100m relay. These 4 years of Bowie's career are among the best we've seen from a sprinter. Shelly Ann Fraser-Pryce summed up Bowie's career nicely in this tweet yesterday: "A great competitor and source of light. Your energy and smile will always be with me." RIP Tori Bowie

Thanks to a slightly illegal wind(+2.6), Andy Diaz Hernandez's 17.80 jump was the farthest ever by a third place finisher. Lazaro Martinez also set the best ever mark for fourth place with his 17.71 jump, although it was also wind aided(+2.6). Jonathan Edwards and Will Claye hold the farthest ever jumps for first and second place respectively. The best marks for places 5-7 were all achieved at the 1988 Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, where the wind was approximately +5.0 for the duration of the competition. Protsenko set the best ever mark for eighth place in Rome in 1987. The men's triple jump has a ton of quality athletes this year. It will be an event I continue to monitor throughout the Diamond League season.

These are fun, keep up the good work

The graph includes every sub 44.50 400m time that has ever been run in Africa. The first athlete to accomplish this was Innocent Egbunike in 1987. He held the 400m African soil record until 1996 when Charles Gitonga ran 44.20 in Nairobi. There was an upswing of fast times from 2014-2018 highlighted by Van Niekerk's 44.11 in 2016. Samukonga became the first athlete to go under 44 seconds in Africa on April 29th and followed it up with his Kip Keino Classic win. There have been 3 total sub 44.50 times on African soil in 2023 which is the most of any year despite it still being fairly early in the season. There's a possibility we could see another sub 44.50 during the 400m at the Rabat Diamond League on 5/28.

These are cool! I think there is a lot of interesting data in multis, maybe looking to see if certain events are correlated more or less with higher overall scores