Almaz Ayana of Ethiopia
Ayana 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 in 1993.
No woman had broken the 30-minute barrier in the previous seven years and Wang's time was also 22 seconds faster than anything that had gone before.
Ayana had faced doping questions immediately after her run, with Sweden's Sarah Lahti, who also smashed her personal best in the race, saying she did not believe her rival was “100 percent”.
The 24-year-old Ayana, who had run the 10,000m only once previously, has never failed a drugs test and, through an interpreter, responded to the interrogation by saying: “My doping is training, my doping is Jesus.”
Top 10 female performances on track
- F Griffith-Joyner (USA) 100m 1988
- Lina Batschauer-Radke (GER) 800m 1928
- Genzebe Dibaba (ETH) 1500m 2015
- Qu Yunxia (CHN) 1500m 1993
Almaz Ayana (ETH) 10,000 m 2016
- Wang Junxia (CHN) 10,000m 1993
- F Griffith-Joyner (USA) 200m 1988
- Jiang Bo (CHN) 1500m 1997
- Tatyana Kazankina (SOV) 1500m 1976
- Tatyana Kazankina (SOV) 800m 1976
Top 10 male performances
- L. Evans (USA) 400m 1968
- R. Clarke (AUS) 10,000m 1965
- U. Bolt (JAM) 200 m 2009
- P. Nurmi (FIN) 10,000m 1924
- H. Reynolds (USA) 400m 1988
- R. Harbig (GER) 800m 1939
- T. Smith (USA) 200m 1968
- U. Bolt (JAM) 100m 2009
- S. Coe (GBR) 800m 1981
- M. Johnson (USA) 200m 1996
Methodology used for ranking
The statisticians at Lancaster University (UK) and CSIRO Data Analytics (Australia), after analysing the times of performances across all Olympics track distances between 1908 and the Rio Olympics for male athletes and from 1928 to Rio for female athletes, found that the world-record shattering run by Ethiopian long-distance runner Almaz Ayana in the 10,000m at the Olympics Rio ranks as the fifth best run ever by a woman track athlete. Using a branch of statistics called extreme value theory, the researchers compared performances in relation to other best times ran by athletes during the same year — to achieve a comparison of the best runs against contemporary expectations.
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