ABSTRACT
The pentathlon for women was first held in Germany in 1928. Initially this consisted of the shot put, long jump, 100m, high jump and javelin events held over two days. In the 1964 Olympic Games the pentathlon became the first combined Olympic event for women, consisting now of the 80m hurdles, shot, high jump, long jump and 200m. In 1977 the 200m was replaced by the 800m and from 1981 the IAAF brought in the seven-event heptathlon in place of the pentathlon, with day one containing the events 100m hurdles, shot, high jump, 200m and day two, the long jump, javelin and 800m. A scoring system is used to assign points to the results from each event and the winner is the woman who accumulates the most points over the two days. The event made its first Olympic appearance in 1984. In the 1988 Olympics held in Seoul, the heptathlon was won by one of the
stars of women’s athletics in the USA, Jackie Joyner-Kersee. The results for all 25 competitors in all seven disciplines are given in Table 13.1 (from Hand et al., 1994). We shall analyse these data using principal component analysis with a view to exploring the structure of the data and assessing how the derived principal component scores (see later) relate to the scores assigned by the official scoring system.
