A History Of The Results Of The National Track & Field Championships Of The USA From 1876 Through 2003
In 1986 one of the most important statistical books for our sport was published:
The United States' National Championships In Track & Field Athletics
1876–1985. The authors were two renowned statisticians, Bill Mallon, MD, and Ian
Buchanan and the book was published by the Press Information Department of
The Athletics Congress/USA (TAC), which has since become USATF.
Their epic work recreated not only the top-end results from each of those national
championships, but also created a précis of each meet, relevant by-event
statistics and an index of every athlete who ever finished in the top 3 at the
Nationals.
With the kind permission of the authors, Track & Field News is
proud to reproduce their work here. This will be an ongoing project, one which
we hope will bring hours of reading enjoyment to all true fans of the world's
most wonderful sport.
We'll begin by printing the by-event results in chronological order. Once the
results sections are complete, we'll tackle the publication of the other sections
of the original book.
Our on-line version of the results is going to include more than just a reproduction
of the original Mallon/Buchanan collaboration. We have picked up the trail of
results where they left off and appended all the meets 1986–2003.
There are marked differences in formatting between their work and ours as we
wanted both to retain the flavor of the original book and also facilitate the
production of the later results by using our own in-house style. We don't think
you'll find the difference between the two methodologies too jarring.
In addition, note that when the T&FN-production years are reached,
women's events are included, the number of placers goes from 6 to 8 and affilliations
are added. In the future, we'll be going back and recreating the women's results
from prior to 1986, but we can't promise we'll ever be able to bring the depth
of research to the project for the early years that Mallon & Buchanan did.
It should also be noted that in the Olympic years of 1924, 1936 and 1948–88, the National Championships were held distinct from the Olympic Trials. The latter competition, of course, was the most important U.S. meet of the year, with many of the top athletes skipping the Nationals.
E. Garry Hill
Mountain View, California
May 22, 2004
Introductory Material To Original Book
(relevant parts only)
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