Closing speed

• Shows: how fast athletes covered the closing metres of a championship final, in 5,000m and 10,000m.
• Does not show: a target to train towards or a selection standard. Closing speed in a championship final depends on how the race was run.
• Coverage: split timing differs by championship, so a closing distance is only offered for finals actually timed at that point. Some series hold medallists only.

Two sources are combined. Published splits are the World Athletics split pages for Olympic and World 5000m and 10,000m finals, covering every finisher. The medallist archive is a curated spreadsheet of championship medallists from 2004 to 2018, covering additional championship series, and supplying last laps for years where World Athletics published kilometre splits only. Where both describe the same run, the published split is kept and the archive fills only the distances the published timing missed; the final-by-final table names the source for each race. Medallist-archive races carry the three medallists, so the lower bands stay empty for them.

Splits come from the World Athletics results pages for each final, alongside the official finish times. A closing split is the finish time minus the recorded time at the checkpoint that distance from home; where a championship has no checkpoint there, the athlete is left out of that figure rather than estimated. Races timed every 1000m support the last kilometre only; races timed every 400m support the last lap and multiples of it; races timed every 100m support every distance shown.

Medians are used rather than averages, because a single athlete dropping out of contention distorts a mean. Bands count finishers only: athletes who did not finish are excluded, as are any whose checkpoint was not recorded. Position bands describe the final result, not the position at the checkpoint.

A tactical final rewards a fast finish; an honest, fast race can be won with a slower last lap. Comparing the closing splits of the same athlete across races is more informative than comparing a personal time trial with a championship final. The athlete comparison counts past finals, and is not a prediction.