The Northern Ireland Ranking Lists have entered the technological age for the first time in 2006 with the appearance of the entire lists on the Web.  This co-incides with a similar move in the UK with British lists appearing on two seperate websites viz Athletics Data and eh Power of 10. Northern Ireland performances are filtered into both these lists as well as into the Irish lists available on the Athletics ireland site.

The Northern Ireland lists are produced by two members of NUTS (National union of Track and Field Statisticians) Alan Keys (men) and me (women). This duo have been working together in producing an annual rankings yearbook since 1983 while this is my 30th year of producing the Women's lists ahving taken over from Maeve Kyle in 1976.

 

During the track and field season there are tens of thousands of performances produced by over a thousand athletes in Northern Ireland as well as those produced outside the Province by athletes eligible to appear on the Northern ireland lists.

Putting these all together is a time consuming task and the greatest difficulty is in determinig the dates of birth of athletes who compete at school level but not at club level. Thus there are those who appear in the lists with unidentifed ages. Given that there are three different age qualifications in Northern Ireland (1st July for schools; 1st Jan for AAI and NIAF and 1st Sept for UK) this is a statisticians nightmare.