Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

394 Track Athletz'cs legs and two arms, and begins to be what may be called an athlete, can hardly be measured by a regularly graded percentage score. Almost any young man who can run at all can learn to run one hundred yards in r 2 seconds. Not one man in a thousand could learn, if he trained all his life– time, to run the hundred in IO flat. And yet the twelve-second man, according to the present per– centage, gets five hundred thirty-eight points, or considerably more than half the nine hundred fifty-eight points that are given to the ten– second man. In the high jump, again, there is a similar difficulty. With the minimum at 3 feet 9 inches a man who jumps 5 feet is reckoned almost "half as good " a jumper as the man who equals the record. Yet almost any man with a little training could learn to jump 5 feet; not one man in ten thousand could learn to jump equal to the record. A performance of half as many seconds or feet does not necessarily make a man "half as good" a performer - such are our linguistic paradoxes - and to represent in cold figures so vague and meaningless a term as "half as good an athlete" is at best a purely arbitrary business. And whether or not the pres– ent system of minimums and percentages are as justly arranged as is possible is a matter of individual opinion which we shall not attempt here to decide.