Track and Field statistics can generally be found online in the form of performance lists.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so this site presents some visualizations of these statistics.
Some of these visualizations are in the form of bar chart races (menu at top right of this page). These videos animate a chart of the top athletes in each event over time, measured by the average of their top 10 outdoor performances to date. The versions posted start around the 1970s or 1980s (when the athletes start to make the lists on alltime-athletics.com) and run up to November 2024.
These will be updated, but in future there will be an interactive tool so that you can set parameters such as the number of performances to average over, the number of bars on the chart, etc., and generate a new video.
The date range to the right of each athlete's name indicates the first and last year when they appeared on the lists (not limited to their top 10 performances).
Some of the existing sites featuring lists are:
Track and Field News' statistics page
© Steve Berkeley 2025. Reproduction of any part of this site is forbidden without the permission of the author.
Source data from alltime-athletics.com, by kind permission of the compiler, Peter Larsson.
Please send suggestions and requests for new content to visualtrackstats@gmail.com.