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National strength profiles · 43 nations · 6,400 performances

Five kinds of athletics nation

Every performance in the 2023 and 2024 World Athletics top-100 lists, scored in WA points, gives each country a strength score in sprints, middle distance, distance, jumps and throws. K-means on those five scores sorts 43 nations into five archetypes. PCA puts them on a map.

PCA scatter of 43 nations colored by archetype. The USA sits alone at the far right of the first component; Kenya, Uganda and Ireland sit far below the rest on the second component.
PC1 (49% of variance) is overall depth: the USA scores 5.0 and Great Britain, next, 2.8. PC2 (29%) separates field-event strength (up) from distance and middle distance (down).

The five archetypes

  1. All-round powerhousesUSA, Great Britain, Netherlands, Italy, Jamaica, Canada. Above average in every group. The USA has the highest score in sprints, jumps and throws.
  2. Distance specialistsKenya, Uganda, Ireland. Kenya's distance score (1297) is the highest of any nation, and it also leads middle distance; jumps and throws are near the floor.
  3. Distance and middle powersAustralia, France, Germany, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Belgium, Switzerland. Broad, with an endurance lean.
  4. Throw and jump powersPoland, New Zealand, Cuba, China, Nigeria and eleven more. A little above average in the field, below it on the track.
  5. Emerging or single-eventBahamas, Hungary, Algeria, Trinidad and Tobago and four more. One group that stands out, with little behind it.
Grouped bar chart of each archetype's mean z-scored strength in the five discipline groups. Distance specialists are high on distance and very low on jumps and throws; all-rounders are positive everywhere.
Each archetype's mean z-scored profile.

How it works

Data
World Athletics outdoor top 100 per event, 16 events, men and women, 2023 and 2024
Strength
Mean of a nation's five best WA scores per group, z-scored
Models
K-means (k = 5) and PCA in scikit-learn
Caveat
Absolute strength, not per capita. Absent groups are filled with the column minimum, and three borderline nations change cluster when k-means is rerun on a newer scikit-learn.

The full writeup has the strength table for two nations from each archetype, the heatmap and the limitations in detail.