T&FN Rankings

[Guest]

Posted this on Current Events in error:

Can anyone explain why Yusuf Alli (Nigeria), the 1990 Commonwealth Games Long Jump champion, who was originally ranked No.9 in the 1990 Track & Field News Annual World Rankings for the Long Jump, has now been omitted from the 1990 rankings? To my knowledge he never received a doping ban.

[gh]

Re: T&FN Rankings

Doping is involved, but for once it was a case that went the other way. At the time of the '90 World Rankings, Borut Bilac of Yugoslavia was under suspension for a drug bust of some sort. Accordingly, we ignored him in the deliberations.

After a protracted period, Bilac ended up being cleared of all charges. Acccordingly, we went back and recast that portion of the Rankings. Because of interaction between Bilac, Alli (originally No. 9) and Gordon McKee (originally No. 10), the won-loss formula changed, so the unusual happened in that McKee went up to No. 9, Bilac became No. 10 and Alli dropped to 11 and out of the picture.

[Guest]

Re: T&FN Rankings

Thanks very much Garry - great detective work.
In the meantime I've discovered a further two anomalies - both from the first year of rankings. I wasn't around at that time and unfortunately my T&FN collection only goes back to 1956, so I don't have much background information for that era. The two oddities are:

Can you explain why Carlos Vera (Chile) is now ranked No.7 in the 1947 Track & Field News Annual World Rankings for the Triple Jump, but was originally omitted from the 1947 rankings?

Can you explain why Ali Isayev (SU), who was originally, ranked No.4 in the 1947 Track & Field News Annual World Rankings for the Discus Throw, has now been omitted from the 1947 rankings?

[gh]

Re: T&FN Rankings

The 1947 Rankings as printed in the 2/48 issue were what was used to generate the first set of published composite Rankings. It wasn't until sometime later that somebody noticed that in a subsequent issue there was a small footnote about the Rankings having been amended becuase of the discovery of more marks. (In that first year, just the finding of a single mark could change the way things went.)

There are changes to a few more events than those two you cite, but I don't have them at hand. But I do recall that we're still trying to reconstruct the HT from that year properly, since the original and the cited amendments don't jibe.

[Guest]

Re: T&FN Rankings

I thought maybe the problem with the Chilean was that originally his marks could not be Verafied.

[Guest]

Re: T&FN Rankings

Hey, forget 1947 Rankings. What I wanna know is, how the heck do you produce Huw?!