Every few years The World Association of Veteran Athletics (WAVA) publishes an Open Class Standard (OC) for each standard athletic event (not the World Record but an approximation to it) along with a table of age adjusting factors (AF). There is a set of Open Class Standards and Age Factors for each sex. We have incorporated these tables into RaceMaster98 and use them to calculate the age and sex adjusted performance level of any competitors performance.
The purpose of producing Age Graded results as well as the traditional results is to allow athletes to be judged on their performance, regardless of age or sex. By enabling this, you could say that their performance is viewed on a level playing field. RaceMaster98 calculates each athletes’ performance as a percentage which, if required, can be sorted and displayed on a report in descending order. Like cream rising to the top of a bottle of milk, it is then very easy to identify the best performances in a race.
Here’s an illustration of how the Age Graded performance is calculated:
A woman of 53 competes in a 10Km Road Race and finishes in a time of 45 minutes and 18 seconds so her performance P = 2718 seconds. The women’s Open Class Standard (OC) for 10Km is 29:55 or 1795 seconds and the Age Factor (AF) for a 53 year old woman is 0.8545. The age standard (AS) is calculated from the Open Class Standard and the Age Factor:
As you can see from the actual race report above, the Age Graded winner was a Man aged 55 and second was a Woman of 50 who had tremendous performances which are highlighted by this method.
WAVA also produce Age Factors for juniors between the ages of eight and twenty but these have not been incorporated into RaceMaster98. All performances of competitors aged below 35 for women and 40 for men use an Age Factor of 1.00.