Ayana’s 10,000m record ranked fifth-best ever

Ethiopian track runner hoping to break 5,000m record in Diamond League meeting tomorrow

LONDON: Almaz Ayana will sign off her stellar 2016 season in Brussels tomorrow by trying to add the 5,000m world record to the incredible 10,000m mark she set at the Rio Olympic Games last month.

World 5,000m champion Ayana, among more than 40 Rio medallists competing in the final Diamond League meeting of the year, has every chance of eclipsing the record of 14min 11.15sec set by fellow Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba in Oslo eight years ago.

Ayana came close to that mark when clocking 14:12.59 in Rome in June but moved into a new stratosphere with her extraordinary exploits in the 25-lap event in Rio.



On the opening morning of the athletics programme, she produced an astounding run to clock 29:17.45 and take 14 seconds off the 23-year-old 10,000m record, set by China’s Wang Junxia in Beijing.

To give some context to that performance, no woman had broken 30 minutes in the previous seven years and Wang’s time was also 22 seconds faster than anything that had gone before.

In the wake of Ayana’s performance, a group of statisticians tried to place it in historical context and, through a complex comparison system, concluded that it ranked as the fifth-best women’s track performance of all-time.



Britain’s Athletics Weekly magazine published the results last week after the statisticians used “extreme value theory” to rank performances against those of their contemporaries.

Number one in the women’s list was Florence Griffith-Joyner’s still-unchallenged 100m world record of 10.49sec at the 1988 US Olympic trials in Indianapolis.

The American’s 200m mark from the same year set at the Seoul Olympics comes in at number seven on the list while Wang’s 10,000m record is one place behind Ayana in sixth.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 8^th, 2016.

Like Sports on Facebook, follow @ETribuneSports on Twitter to stay informed and join in the conversation.