Select top X rows for multiple key values

[rjl]

I have what I think is a simple problem but I aged brain is not functioning this evening....

I'm working on a (bike) race application that ranks racers by total points of races throughout the year. I have a table that looks like the following (for columns):

name
points
resultsKey

The 'resultsKey' field denotes the results of a particular race. This table is more of a log so 'names' appear more than once (once for each resultsKey). For example I'll have the following:

racer1 100 1
racer2 90 1
racer3 80 1
racer1 60 2
racer2 80 2
racer3 100 2
racer4 50 3
racer1 100 3
racer3 40 3
.....

The application needs to aggregate points for each racer, but only use the top X rows for each racer. In this example, if X == 2, then I need to have a query that returns the following rows:

racer1 100 1
racer1 100 2
racer2 90 1
racer2 80 2
racer3 100 2
racer3 80 1
racer4 50 3

In the end, the query(s) I run will create a summary table with one row/racer with the summary of points for their top X races. This would look like (using the racer table example above):

racer1 200
racer3 180
racer2 170
racer4 50

I can definitely do this in the application (using J2EE), but I would like to create the summary table in MySQL using some DB query(s). I'm running MySQL 4.1.11.

Thanks for any advice....

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redBeard