Athletes with february birthdays: what to know and why

Every "youngest ever" claim is two dates and a subtraction, and both dates are usually softer than the claim. The event date was witnessed by officials. The birth date was witnessed by nobody the sport has ever met. This page is about what that asymmetry does to age records, and what a directory should do with them.

What to take away

• An age-at-achievement record depends on the exact day of the birth, the exact day of the event, and a rule for counting between them.
• The birth side of that subtraction is the one nobody in the sport witnessed, and it is where the uncertainty lives.
• A directory should repeat such a record only with the recognizing body named, and should never recompute it from dates of its own.

What the subtraction needs

Input	Who witnessed it	Typical weakness
Event date	Officials, press, results systems	The time zone at a venue far from home; an event spread across days
Birth date	A registrar, years before the sport was involved	Everything the April page describes, plus an incentive to adjust it
Counting rule	Nobody; it is a convention	Whether the birthday itself counts, how leap days count, years and days or days alone

A record stated as "the youngest, at so many years and so many days" has done the arithmetic to the day, and is therefore only as good as the least certain of the three. The event date is usually solid. The rule is usually unstated. The birth date is the problem.

Why the birth side is soft

Youth records are where the incentive to move a date is strongest and the record is furthest away. A federation verifying one has to rely on documents produced years earlier in a registration system it does not control. Where those documents are late registrations, re-registrations, or from places with thin civil registration, the verification is a judgment about paperwork. It can be done carefully. It cannot be done with certainty. That is not an accusation against anyone; it is a statement about what a document can prove.

How a record gets recognized, and what that means

A world record in a sport is recognized by that sport's governing body under its own rules, which include what evidence of age it accepts. General record-keeping organizations such as Guinness World Records apply their own evidence standards, which differ. A record recognized by one may not be recognized by another, and the difference is usually the age evidence rather than the performance.

For a directory the consequence is simple. A record is a claim by a named body under a named standard, and it should be repeated in that form: who recognized it, when, under what rule. Recomputing the age from a date the directory holds produces a number no body has verified, presented as if one had.

Where this site's own arithmetic is not allowed

• No age is computed from a stored date and displayed.
• No youngest-or-oldest ordering is generated from stored dates.
• A record stated by a governing body may be quoted with the body named. The site's own date field is not evidence for it.
• Where two bodies disagree, both are stated. The January index calls this the disputed grade and says not to pick.

The rule against recomputation is the one the July page gives for ages in general, applied where the stakes are highest. A record is a public claim about a person, and a wrong one is hard to retract.

Reading a record claim

• Find the recognizing body. If none is named, the claim is a press line.
• Find the rule. Years and days? Age at the start of the event, or at the moment of the result?
• Check whether the birth date behind the claim is the athlete's official age in the sport or a document date. The athletes' January page explains why those differ.
• Treat a record that changed hands because a date was corrected as the normal case, not a scandal.

Common questions

Are youngest-ever records less reliable than performance records?

They depend on one more input, the birth date, that the sport did not witness. Everything else being equal, yes.

If a federation has verified an age, is that the end of it?

It is a verification under that federation's standard on that date. It can be revisited, and federations do revisit them.

Why does a page about February athletes talk about records at all?

Because a record is the one place where a published birth date does real work, and the place where getting it wrong does the most damage. The famous-February page covers how such dates go wrong in the first place.