A placing table is a team

ranking A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than" or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of o ...

system used in

sport Sport pertains to any form of Competition, competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and Skill, skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to specta ...

competition Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, indivi ...

s that feature multiple finals. It shares similarities with the better-known

medal table The Olympic medal table is a method of sorting the medal placements of countries in the modern-day Olympics and Paralympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not officially recognize a ranking of participating countries at the Olympic ...

found at most

multi-sport event A multi-sport event is an organized sporting event, often held over multiple days, featuring competition in many different sports among organized teams of athletes from (mostly) nation-states. The first major, modern, multi-sport event of interna ...

s, but goes beyond the top three performers and assigns weighted scores to each athlete based on their overall final placing, then aggregates the scores of all athletes in a team to provide a final team standing. This system is most commonly found in the

sport of athletics Athletics is a group of sporting events that involves competitive running, jumping, throwing sports, throwing, and walking. The most common types of athletics competitions are track and field, road running, cross country running, and racewalking ...

: both the

International Association of Athletics Federations World Athletics, formerly known as the International Amateur Athletic Federation (from 1912 to 2001) and International Association of Athletics Federations (from 2001 to 2019, both abbreviated as the IAAF) is the international governing body for ...

(IAAF) and

European Athletics The European Athletic Association (more commonly known as European Athletics) is the governing body for athletics in Europe. It is one of the six Area Associations of the world's athletics governing body World Athletics. European Athletics has 51 ...

release placing tables for the major championships they organise. A typical system awards a decreasing number of points for the top eight finishers, with eight points for first place, down to one point for eighth place. Non-finishers and disqualified athletes typically receive zero points. The advantage of a placing table over a traditional medal table is that it is a better indicator of the overall quality of a team – medal tables demonstrate a ranking bias in favour of teams with a small number of very high quality performers over larger teams with fewer medallists but a greater number of finalists. Another advantage is that placing tables are less affected by post-competition doping disqualifications, as reassignment of a points score is a simple technical adjustment compared to the minting and re-presentation of physical medals. Several high profile

international athletics competitions In the sport of athletics, international competitions between national teams can be distinguished into four main types: * Multi-sport events, commonly referred to as games, where athletics events form part of a wider sporting programme * World cha ...

are contested via a placing table format, with no individual medals awarded. Major competitions of this type are the

IAAF Continental Cup The IAAF Continental Cup was an international track and field competition organized by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). The event was proposed by IAAF former President Primo Nebiolo and was first held in 1977 as t ...

(formed as the IAAF World Cup in 1977), the European Team Championships (formed as the

European Cup The UEFA Champions League (abbreviated as UCL, or sometimes, UEFA CL) is an annual club football competition organised by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and contested by top-division European clubs, deciding the competit ...

in 1965),European Cup
GBR Athletics. Retrieved 2019-10-07. the European Champion Clubs Cup (first held in 1975), the

DécaNation DécaNation is an annual track and field meeting organized by the French Athletics Federation (Fédération Française d'Athlétisme) since 2005. The competition comprises national teams of athletes competing in a decathlon, with each athlete compet ...

(created in 2005) and the

Athletics World Cup The Athletics World Cup was a team-based international athletics competition held in 2018. It featured eight national teams based on world rankings, with each team entering one athlete per event, and points gained on the basis of finishing posit ...

(created in 2018). The

European Athletics Indoor Cup The European Athletics Indoor Cup was a biennial (formerly annual) athletics sporting event that first took place in 2003 in Leipzig, Germany, where it was also organized the following year. The 3rd edition was held in 2006, in order to be held e ...

, held from 2003 to 2008, is the highest level indoor

track and field Track and field is a sport that includes athletic contests based on running, jumping, and throwing skills. The name is derived from where the sport takes place, a running track and a grass field for the throwing and some of the jumping events ...

competition to have used a placing table system. The ranking system was already in use in athletics at the start of the 20th century, being the deciding factor in the Finland-Sweden Athletics International since 1925. A small-scale version of a placing table is found in

cross country running Cross country running is a sport in which teams and individuals run a race on open-air courses over natural terrain such as dirt or grass. The course, typically long, may include surfaces of grass and earth, pass through woodlands and open coun ...

, where the team standing of a single race is decided by the aggregate placings of each team's athletes.World Cross Country Championships
GBR Athletics. Retrieved 2019-10-07. An alternative team scoring system exemplified by the European Throwing Cup is a performance-based team score, where each athlete's individual performance is converted into a score via a standardised points table and the team score is the aggregate of these performance scores, similar to a

decathlon The decathlon is a combined event in Athletics (sport), athletics consisting of ten track and field events. The word "decathlon" was formed, in analogy to the word "pentathlon", from Greek language, Greek δέκα (''déka'', meaning "ten") and ...

References

External links

IAAF
official website Sports standings Sports records and statistics Sport of athletics terminology Team combination track and field competitions {{Athletics-stub

See also

References

External links