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They are largely the same sport under two names. 'Athletics' is the international and British term, used by the governing body World Athletics, and it encompasses everything from stadium track and field to road running, cross country and race walking. 'Track and field' is the American term and refers more specifically to the stadium events: the track races — sprints, middle distance, distance, hurdles and relays — and the field events, the jumps and throws contested on the infield. In practice, when Americans say 'track and field' and the rest of the world says 'athletics', they usually mean the same collection of running, jumping and throwing events that form the core Olympic programme.

The sport divides into five families. Sprints cover the 100m, 200m and 400m, plus the sprint relays. Middle and long distance runs from 800m through 1500m, 5000m and 10,000m to the marathon, with the 3000m steeplechase as a specialist event. Hurdles include the 110m (100m for women) and the 400m hurdles. The jumps are long jump, triple jump, high jump and pole vault. The throws are shot put, discus, hammer and javelin. Finally, the combined events — the men's decathlon and women's heptathlon — package several of these together over two days. Road running and race walking round out the full athletics programme beyond the stadium.

Usain Bolt of Jamaica holds the men's 100m world record at 9.58 seconds, set at the 2009 Berlin World Championships, and the 200m record at 19.19 seconds from the same meeting — both untouched for over fifteen years. During that 100m he reached a peak speed of around 44 km/h. On the women's side, Florence Griffith-Joyner's 10.49 seconds from 1988 remains the oldest and most debated sprint record, with her 200m mark of 21.34 also still standing. Bolt is almost universally regarded as the fastest human who has ever been reliably timed, and no active sprinter has come especially close to his records.

Since 2010, a single false start means immediate disqualification, with no warning — a stricter rule introduced to speed up televised sprint starts and end the gamesmanship of deliberate early moves. A start is judged false if an athlete leaves the blocks before the gun or reacts within 0.100 seconds of it, since sports science holds that no human can hear and react faster than that. The rule most famously caught Usain Bolt, who was disqualified from the 100m final at the 2011 World Championships. Combined events such as the decathlon retain a one-warning system, reflecting the different demands on multi-event athletes across a long competition.

It is a combination of factors rather than any single gene. Many top runners come from highland regions above 2,000 metres, where a lifetime at altitude boosts oxygen-carrying capacity. A culture of running long distances to school from childhood builds an aerobic base early, and specific East African populations appear to have physiological advantages such as slender lower limbs that make running economical. Crucially, the economic incentive is enormous: prize money and appearance fees from major marathons can transform a runner's family, drawing huge numbers into the sport and creating fierce competition. Training hubs like Iten in Kenya concentrate talent, coaching and pacing partners, producing a self-reinforcing cycle of excellence.

Super-shoes are running shoes that combine a stiff carbon-fibre plate with a thick layer of lightweight, highly responsive foam, a design popularised by Nike's Vaporfly from 2017. Together they store and return energy and reduce the muscular cost of running, improving economy by an estimated 4 percent — enough to have driven marathon and distance records sharply downward. They are legal, but regulated: World Athletics caps the sole thickness (40mm for road shoes, less for track spikes), limits shoes to a single plate, and requires that models be available to all athletes rather than being one-off prototypes. Critics argue the shoes distort record comparisons across eras; supporters point out that the technology is on sale to anyone.