Extreme records in athletics are increasingly questioned as being due to the use of performance enhancing drugs. To assess such performances, statistical methods are developed that are based on extreme value techniques for estimating the ultimate performance possible by the current population of competing athletes. These methods are applied to the analysis of data from the women's 3000 m track event, where we find that a recently broken record shows signs of being inconsistent with previous performances.
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Robinson et al. (1995) studied this question.
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