Accurate Estimates of Ultimate 100-Meter Records

TL;DR

This paper applies a novel heterogeneous extreme value theory to estimate the ultimate world records for 100-meter sprints, providing both point estimates and confidence bounds that are close to current records.

Contribution

It introduces a new application of heterogeneous extreme value theory to accurately estimate ultimate athletic records from extensive historical data.

Findings

Estimated men's ultimate record: 9.56 seconds.

Estimated women's ultimate record: 10.34 seconds.

95% confidence bounds are close to current world records.

Abstract

We employ the novel theory of heterogeneous extreme value statistics to accurately estimate the ultimate world records for the 100-m running race, for men and for women. For this aim we collected data from 1991 through 2023 from thousands of top athletes, using multiple fast times per athlete. We consider the left endpoint of the probability distribution of the running times of a top athlete and define the ultimate world record as the minimum, over all top athletes, of all these endpoints. For men we estimate the ultimate world record to be 9.56 seconds. More prudently, employing this heterogeneous extreme value theory we construct an accurate asymptotic 95% lower confidence bound on the ultimate world record of 9.49 seconds, still quite close to the present world record of 9.58. For the women's 100-meter dash our point estimate of the ultimate world record is 10.34 seconds, somewhat lower than the world record of 10.49. The more prudent 95% lower confidence bound on the women's ultimate world record is 10.20.