The running events, which include sprints, middle and long-distance events, race walking and hurdling, are won by the athlete with the fastest time. The jumping and throwing events are won by the athlete who achieves the greatest distance or height. Regular jumping events include long jump, triple jump, high jump and pole vault, while the most common throwing events are shot put,weight, javelin, discus and hammer. There are also "combined events" or "multi events", such as pentathlon consisting of five events,heptathlon consisting of seven events, and decathlon consisting of ten events.For every multi event, athletes participate in a combination of sprinting, jumping, throwing, middle distance, and long distance events. Most track and field events are individual sports with a single victor, but a number are relay races consisting of four members. Events are almost exclusively divided by gender, although both the men's and women's competitions are usually held at the same venue. Men and women have different weights for their throwing implements – men's javelin is 800 grams compared to 600 for women, men's weight throw is 35 pounds compared to 20 for women, men's discus is 2 kilograms to women's 1, men's shot put is 16 pounds compared to 8 pounds for women, and men's hammer throw is also 16 pounds to the women's 8. Additionally, men's high hurdles are at height of 42 inches compared to women's hurdles which are 33 inches. For the intermediate hurdles (400 meter hurdles), the men's hurdle height is 36 inches compared to 30 inches for women.
Track and field is categorised under the umbrella sport of athletics, which also includes road running, cross country running, and race walking. At the international level, the two most prestigious international track and field competitions are athletics competition at the Olympic Games and the IAAF World Championships in Athletics. The International Association of Athletics Federations is the international governing body.
The sport of track and field has its roots in human prehistory. Track and field-style events are among the oldest of all sporting competitions, as running, jumping and throwing are natural and universal forms of human physical expression. The first recorded examples of organized track and field events at asports festival are the Ancient Olympic Games. At the first Games in 776 BC in Olympia, Greece, only one event was contested: the stadion footrace.[3]The scope of the Games expanded in later years to include further running competitions, but the introduction of the Ancient Olympic pentathlon marked a step towards track and field as it is recognized today—it comprised a five-event competition of the long jump, javelin throw, discus throw, stadion footrace,[3] and wrestling.
Track and field events were also present at the Panhellenic Games in Greece around this period, and they spread to Rome in Italy around 200 BC.[6][7]After the period of Classical antiquity (in which the sport was largely Greco-Roman influenced) new track and field events began developing in parts of Northern Europe in the Middle Ages. The stone put and weight throw competitions popular among Celtic societies in Ireland and Scotland were precursors to the modern shot put and hammer throw events. One of the last track and field events to develop was the pole vault, which stemmed from competitions such as the Fierljeppen contests in the Northern European Lowlands in the 18th century.
Discrete modern track and field competitions, separate from general sporting festivals, were first recorded in the 19th century. These were typically organised by educational institutions, military organisations and sports clubs as competitions between rival establishments.[8] Competitions in the English public schools were conceived as human equivalents of horse racing, fox hunting and hare coursing, influenced by a Classics-rich curriculum. The Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt is the oldest running club in the world, with written records going back to 1831 and evidence that it was established by 1819.[9] The school organised Paper Chase races in which runners followed a trail of paper shreds left by two "foxes";[9] even today RSSH runners are called "hounds" and a race victory is a "kill".[10] The first definite record of Shrewsbury's (cross-country) Annual Steeplechase is in 1834, making it the oldest running race of the modern era.[9] The school also lays claim to the oldest track and field meeting still in existence, originating in the Second Spring Meeting first documented in 1840.[9] This featured a series of throwing and jumping events with mock horse races including the Derby Stakes, the Hurdle Race and the Trial Stakes. Runners were entered by "owners" and named as though they were horses.[9] 13 miles (21 km) away and a decade later, the first Wenlock Olympian Gameswere held at Much Wenlock racecourse.[11] Events at the 1851 Wenlock Games included a "half-mile foot race" (805 m) and a "leaping in distance" competition.[12]
In 1865, Dr William Penny Brookes of Wenlock helped set up the National Olympian Association, which held their first Olympian Games in 1866 at The Crystal Palace in London.[12] This national event was a great success, attracting a crowd of over ten thousand people.[12] In response, that same year the Amateur Athletic Club was formed and held a championship for "gentlemen amateurs" in an attempt to reclaim the sport for the educated elite.[12] Ultimately the "allcomers" ethos of the NOA won through and the AAC was reconstituted as the Amateur Athletic Association in 1880, the first national body for the sport of athletics. The AAA Championships, the de facto British national championships despite being for England only, have been held annually since 3 July 1880 with breaks only during two world wars and 2006–2008.[13] The AAA was effectively a global governing body in the early years of the sport, codifying its rules for the first time.
Meanwhile, the United States began holding an annual national competition—the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships—first held in 1876 by the New York Athletic Club.[14] The establishment of general sports governing bodies for the United States (the Amateur Athletic Union in 1888) and France (the Union des sociétés françaises de sports athlétiques in 1889) put the sport on a formal footing and meant that international competitions became possible.
The establishment of the modern Olympic Games at the end of the 19th century marked a new high for track and field. The Olympic athletics programme, comprising track and field events plus a marathon race, contained many of the foremost sporting competitions of the 1896 Summer Olympics. The Olympics also consolidated the use of metric measurements in international track and field events, both for race distances and for measuring jumps and throws. The Olympic athletics programme greatly expanded over the next decades, and track and field contests remained among the Games' most prominent. The Olympics was the elite competition for track and field, and only amateur sportsmen could compete. Track and field continued to be a largely amateur sport, as this rule was strictly enforced: Jim Thorpe was stripped of his track and field medals from the1912 Olympics after it was revealed that he had played baseball professionally.[15]
That same year, the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) was established, becoming the international governing body for track and field, and it enshrined amateurism as one of its founding principles for the sport. The National Collegiate Athletic Association held their first Men's Outdoor Track and Field Championship in 1921, making it one of the most prestigious competitions for students, and this was soon followed by the introduction of track and field at the inaugural World Student Games in 1923.[16] The first continental track and field competition was the 1919 South American Championships, which was followed by the European Athletics Championships in 1934.[17]
Up until the early 1920s, track and field had been almost exclusively a male-only pursuit. A growing women's sports movement in Europe and North America led to the establishment of the Women's World Games in 1921 and this ultimately caused the introduction of five track and field events for women in the athletics at the 1928 Summer Olympics.[18] In China, women's track and field events were being held in the 1920s, but were subject to criticism and disrespect from audiences. In 1923, physical education advocate Zhang Ruizhen called for greater equality and participation of women in Chinese track and field.[19] The rise of Kinue Hitomi and her 1928 Olympic medal for Japan signified the growth of women's track and field in East Asia.[20] More women's events were gradually introduced as years progressed (although it was only towards the end of the century that the men's and women's programmes approached parity of events). Marking an increasingly inclusive approach to the sport, major track and field competitions for disabled athletes were first introduced at the 1960 Summer Paralympics.
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