Decathlon, women

What to remember

Ten events over two consecutive days, each converted into points on an official scale: the decathlon is mostly contested by men, while women usually compete in the heptathlon. In Columbia, Missouri, Lithuania's Austra Skujytė nevertheless scored 8,358 points on April 15, 2005, at the Audrey Walton Combined Events.

The name comes from the Greek déka, "ten", and áthlon, "contest". Since the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, where King Gustav V of Sweden is said to have hailed Jim Thorpe as "the world's greatest athlete", that title has traditionally gone to the decathlon winner. Among men, France's Kevin Mayer scored 9,126 points on September 15 and 16, 2018 at the Décastar in Talence.

Born in 1979 in Biržai, Skujytė was a combined events specialist. In the heptathlon she took Olympic silver in 2004 and bronze in 2012. At the London Games, on August 4, 2012, she raised her personal best to 6,599 points and threw 17.31 m in the shot put, the best mark ever achieved within a heptathlon.