Combined Events

Combined events are par excellence most fascinating to both participants and spectators.
They are associated to the idea (the myth?) of the complete athlete.

The, historically, first combined event was the Pentathlon of the ancient Olympics. It comprised a stadium race, long jump, discus and javelin throws as well as wrestling. The archeologists are not unanimous on the classification. No scoring tables existed at that time, essentially because of the absence of reliable timekeeping systems. Most probably the winner of three of the athletics events was the pentathlon winner. In case of a tie, the later was broken through the wrestling event.

By the way here is the proper naming of combined events (no mixing of greek and latin please):

diathlon

triathlon

tetrathlon

pentathlon

hexathlon

heptathlon

octathlon

enneathlon

decathlon

Combined events were introduced as soon as sports started making their come-back. For a short historical account you can read the article by Gaston Meyer (page one, page two) in the superb Encyclopédie du Sport of Jean Dauven (1961).

Combined events exist in various sports. Some are absurd, like Modern Pentathlon: why on earth introduce a combined event with the same drawback as wrestling in the ancient one? Some are naïve, like Triathlon: why have a continuous running time forcing technical decisions that have nothing to do with athletic value.

But the king of all combined events is the Decathlon.
It's creation is totally arbitrary. Gaston Meyer explains that had we wished to test the overall value of a sportsman we should have created a tetrathlon: 100m, high jump, shot put, 1500m. It would have been a drab choice indeed! Decathlon has magic. You have to compete in one to feel it (or experience one on the stadium). Since the introduction of women's pole vault I am waiting for an official women's decathlon.

Decathlon is at the origin of one of the things that have always fascinated me: Scoring tables (we talk about these here).

The fact that Modern Pentathlon is a total miss (despite its Olympic status) leads naturally to the question: what would have been the right choice? Below I shall try to give my ideas on the matter.

My starting point is the Military Pentathlon The events: target shooting, grenade throwing, (obstacle) swimming, obstacle course, cross. It's a really fine event. The next step would be to de-militarise is slightly.
There are two precision events, something that is superfluous for a civil pentathlon. So, the idea is to drop target shooting. Moreover the obstacle swimming would put extra strain on facilities so the idea here is to drop it and replace it by finswimming. One more locomotion event could be added in the form of cycling over a not perfectly flat terrain (mountain bikes is what I have in mind). The obstacle course will not be a problem: one must use existing military installations. The only event to specify further is the precision event. I am in favour of a throwing event because it does not require special equipment (compared to a gun for target shooting). However a throwing event must have two parts: precision and distance. The throwing implement I have in mind is a steel ball of roughly 1 kg mass. (If the french petanque balls come close to weight, they could be used because they are widely available). This could be the basis for a New Pentathlon.