Olympic Decathlon involve alternately pressing the 1 and 2 keys. Other events have more complex controls, with the pole vault using five different keys. "Decathlon" received the "Creative Computing" Game of the Year Award at the 1980 West Coast Computer Faire. "BYTE" in 1981 called "Decathlon" "a great party game" and "a remarkable simulation ... challenging and entertaining", praising the adherence to the real decathlon's rules and the TRS-80 and Apple II versions' graphics. "Computer Gaming World" stated in 1982 that "Decathlon" "has all the characteristics that are required of a long-lasting, quality game". It described the game as having "superb graphics
Decathlon simultaneously. The one-hour decathlon is a special type of decathlon in which the athletes have to start the last of ten events (1500 m) within sixty minutes of the start of the first event. The world record holder is Czech decathlete Robert Změlík, who achieved 7,897 points at a meeting in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, in 1992. In Masters athletics, performance scores are age graded before being applied to the standard scoring table. This way, marks that would be competitive within an age division can get rated, even if those marks would not appear on the scale designed for younger age groups.