Data sources
The kinds of sources we use, in order of trust, and how each one shows up on the site.
Source types, in order of trust
- Race organisers and official timing results. The organiser's published result is the official record. These sources give a result the Official label.
- Governing bodies, such as World Athletics athlete profiles. Also Official.
- Reputable media and running publications, such as Runner's World and national newspapers, when they state the exact finish time. These are labelled Reported.
- Everything else: older lists, social posts and fan sites. We never use these as a source. A time we can't match to one of the sources above stays Unverified.
What we link to
Every Official or Reported time links to the page where it's stated, together with the date we checked it. We link to sources rather than copying their content. We don't scrape or republish whole results databases.
Where the original list came from
The list started as a hand-compiled spreadsheet of publicly reported times. Those times are labelled Unverified until each one is checked against a source. We're working through them runner by runner. See the dataset page for current counts.