Hard: Who was the best soccer player in 2026? Easier: Who was the best in the 100m women's sprint? Here I use some light statistics[↓] to calculate for the top athletes (up to 200 each) in 74 events how "WOW" was their performance among their peers, and then compare "WOW scores" to create a deeply questionable cross-discipline global rank.
WOW Scores
number of results at each WOW Score
| Rank | Athlete | Event | WOW Score |
|---|
Roughly speaking, I took the 2026 top-200 results for each discipline, fitted a standard extreme-value distribution for each, converted results like "10.3s" and "3.2m" into probabilities based on the fitted distribution, and then reparametrized those scores to make them easier to compare and more stable. Nothing here is sports analysis or betting advice.↑