[1] The rapid evolution of the scoring tables caused results to vary widely: for instance, Akilles Järvinen, the silver medalist in the decathlon in both the 1928 and 1932 Olympics, would have won gold medals in both years rather handily under most later scoring tables.
[3] Beginning in 1920, the IAAF considered, at least, the following criteria for a legitimate decathlon scoring table:[4] (1) The table should reflect the fact that, at higher levels of performance, a unit gain (such as a decrement of 0.01 second in sprint times) is more significant than at lower levels of performance, because of the physiological limitations of the human body.
In 1934, the IAAF adopted a new set of scoring tables, proposed by Suomen Urheiluliitto (the Finnish athletics federation), that had already been used for a few years in national competitions in Finland.
[3] The rationale behind the changes was the proportion between kinetic energy imparted to a throwing implement and the square of its initial velocity – and therefore distance travelled – so that a progressive or even linear table caused unfairly large increments in the score for throwing events.
The IAAF working committee therefore met in 1983 in Prague to develop improved tables, putting forth the following nine principles, which still stand today:[4] The 1984 tables are still in use today, with a slight update in 1998 to add entries for the long throws for odd numbers of centimeters (these were rounded to the next-lower multiples of 2 cm until 1997).