Random Track and Field Athletes

So you drew a track and field athlete

You wanted a track and field athlete and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It covers sprinters and marathon runners, vaulters and throwers, hurdlers and decathletes and race walkers, from the 1920s to right now.

The tool is the simple part. Athletics rewards understanding, because it is not really one sport at all, and because it keeps its history in a way that no other sport does, with consequences the sport is still arguing about.

One stadium, a dozen different sports

Athletics is a federation of unrelated activities that happen to share a stadium. A shot putter and a marathon runner have less physically in common than a jockey and a sumo wrestler. One is built for a single explosive second and weighs a hundred and forty kilos; the other has spent years making their body as light as it can be while remaining alive.

Between those poles sit the sprinters, all fast-twitch power, the middle-distance runners who need both engine and finish, the jumpers who convert horizontal speed into vertical or forward flight, the throwers with their beautiful and violent rotations, and the hurdlers, who must sprint while doing arithmetic with their stride pattern. Then there are the combined events, the decathlon and the heptathlon, ten disciplines over two days or seven, which exist to find the best all-rounder and which produce the most exhausted human beings in sport. When the tool draws you a name, the event is the sport. Everything else is a shared postcode.

Competing against the dead

Here is what makes athletics different from every ball sport on this site. The clock and the tape measure do not care who else turned up. A footballer's greatness is relative to their opponents, their teammates, their era. A sprinter's is an absolute number, and that number can be compared directly to a number produced by somebody who died before they were born.

Usain Bolt ran the hundred metres in 9.58 seconds in Berlin in 2009. Bob Beamon jumped 8.90 metres in the thin Mexico City air in 1968 and beat the world record by more than half a metre, a margin so absurd that people thought the measuring device had broken. Those performances are still there, permanent, waiting. So every athlete in this list is racing not only the people in the neighbouring lanes but the entire history of the event, and they know exactly what they need to do, to the hundredth of a second. Nothing is hidden. There is no luck, no referee, no bad bounce. That is the cruelty and the purity of it.

The one-centimetre trick

Two men on this list share a secret, and it is a wonderfully cynical one. Sergey Bubka, the Ukrainian who owned the pole vault in the 1980s and 1990s, broke the world record thirty-five times. He could have jumped much higher on many of those days. He chose instead to raise the bar by exactly one centimetre, over and over, because he was paid a bonus for every world record he set.

Sweden's Mondo Duplantis, the finest vaulter who has ever lived, has done precisely the same thing. Every one of his fifteen world records has been a one-centimetre improvement on the last, taking the bar from 6.17 metres in 2020 to 6.31 metres in 2026, at which point he had broken the record more consecutive times than Bubka ever did. He is so far ahead of the field that his rivals' best jumps are twenty centimetres below his own, and the only real question at any competition is which number he feels like writing into the book that evening. It is a completely rational response to how the sport pays its stars, and it is also, if you squint, an athlete rationing out immortality one centimetre at a time.

The record book has a problem

Now the uncomfortable part, and any honest account of athletics has to include it. Several of the sport's world records are extremely old. The women's 400 metres record was set in 1985. The women's 800 metres record dates from 1983. The women's 100 and 200 metres records were set in 1988. These are not marks that modern athletes are nibbling at. They are, in some cases, more than half a second clear of anything the best women alive can run, and forty years have not touched them.

The context is that this was the era of systematic, state-organised doping in parts of Eastern Europe, a programme documented in detail after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the archives opened. Athletes who set those records have generally denied wrongdoing, and many were never individually implicated. But the sport knows the record book is compromised, and European Athletics has formally proposed wiping records set before modern testing and starting again, an idea that has never quite been carried out because it would erase honest performances alongside doubtful ones. So several names on this list hold records that everybody quietly discounts, and several modern athletes will run the race of their lives and never see their name in the book. It is the largest unresolved argument in the sport.

What a random track and field athlete is good for

• Quiz and trivia prep. A random athlete, especially a thrower or a walker, will defeat almost anyone who only watches the sprints.
• Championship sweepstakes. Draw athletes for a group during a World Championships or an Olympics.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a name, find their event, look up the world record, and see how close they came.
• Settling a debate. Pull two athletes and argue the greater career, which in athletics comes down to a real question: records or medals?
• Finding somebody to watch. The footage is all there. Beamon's jump, Bolt in Berlin, Duplantis clearing a height nobody has cleared.

Athletics questions

Who is the fastest man in history?

Usain Bolt of Jamaica, who ran 9.58 seconds for the 100 metres in Berlin in 2009 and also holds the 200 metres record at 19.19 seconds. Both have stood since then.

Why are some world records so old?

Several women's records date from the mid-1980s, an era of documented state-organised doping programmes in parts of Eastern Europe. The sport has debated wiping and restarting the record book, but doing so would also erase legitimate performances, so the records still stand.

Why does Mondo Duplantis break the record by one centimetre?

Because vaulters are paid a bonus for every world record. He raises the bar by the minimum each time, exactly as Sergey Bubka did in the 1980s and 1990s. Duplantis has now set fifteen world records this way.

Can I pull several athletes, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. World Athletics, records. worldathletics.org
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, athletics. britannica.com