Athletics (Track & Field) in 1912: Starting: blocks, 'set' and the gun

2:00:35 — Kelvin Kiptum, Chicago, 8 October 2023 Athletics — track and field to Americans — is the sport of running, jumping and throwing, the purest expression of the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius: faster, higher, stronger. It gathers roughly two dozen disciplines under one roof, from the 9.58-second detonation of the 100 metres to the two-hour attrition of the marathon, from the 2.45-metre high jump to the 90-metre javelin. Every result is a measurement against the clock or the tape, expressed in the same universal units everywhere on earth, which is why a schoolchild's stopwatch and an Olympic final speak the same language. It is the founding sport of the ancient and modern Games alike.

What sets athletics apart is its breadth and its honesty. No other sport asks its athletes to be, in turn, an explosive sprinter, an endurance machine, a spring-loaded jumper and a rotational thrower — and then, in the decathlon, to be all of them across two days. The events reward physiques so different that the shot-putter and the marathoner barely look like members of the same species. Yet the currency is identical: centimetres and hundredths of a second, verified by photo finish and calibrated tape, with little of the judging subjectivity that clouds other sports. Athletics is the closest thing sport has to a controlled experiment on the limits of the human body.

The objective in athletics could not be simpler: run faster, jump further or higher, or throw an implement a greater distance than everyone else. What makes the sport rich is the variety of ways that objective is pursued and measured. In the running events, the winner is whoever crosses the line first, timed electronically to a hundredth of a second and separated, if necessary, by photo finish. In the field events, athletes get a set number of attempts and are ranked by their single best mark. There is very little to interpret: the clock and the tape decide.