Sports Series: The sport that started all other sports – track and field

If you follow the rabbit hole of, “When did competitive competitions begin?” you’ll find that it all started with a fairly simple sport: track and field. 

It’s speculated that track and field began in 776 B.C. at the first ancient Olympic Games held in Olympia, Greece. 

At these games, the “stadion” was the only track event. The stadion was a race of about 200 meters – the length of the stadium. 

Coroebus won this race, becoming history’s first Olympic champion. 

According to athleticscholarships.net, some literary traditions claim “this (the stadion) was the only athletic event of the games for the first 13 Olympic festivals.”

As the Olympics grew in popularity, other athletic events were added to the games. Soon, discus, javelin and the broad jump were added to the competition. 

Around 393 A.D., the ancient Olympic Games came to an end, and track and field was merely a memory. 

Between the 12th century and the 19th century, track and field was revived intermittently. The competition reemerged as a popular sport in 1864, when Cambridge and Oxford University competed in the first university track meet.

Only a few years later in 1873, the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America held the United States’ first collegiate races. In 1888, the Amateur Athletic Union – an organization that governed track and field for nearly a century – put on the U.S.’s first championships. 

Track and field quickly gained popularity in the United States, but athletes were soon faced with a complicated issue: professionalism. 

According to athleticscholarships.net, “a major issue for all athletes was their status as amateurs.”

“For many years track and field was considered a purely amateur sport and athletes could not accept training money or cash prizes. If charged with professionalism, athletes could be banned from competition for life.” 

This issue arose in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. After winning both the decathlon and pentathlon, U.S. athlete Jim Thorpe was robbed of his medals and banned from further competition because the International Olympic Committee discovered he had played semi-professional baseball. 

Thankfully, the IOC returned Thorpe’s medals to him in 1982. 

In the 1920s, the sport began to reach a larger demographic. The first National Collegiate Athletic Association national championships were held for men in 1921. Seven years later, women’s track and field joined the Olympics. 

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union battled for Olympic medals in what athleticscholarships.net calls “one of the sport’s longest and most competitive rivalries.” 

Out of the nine Olympics the Soviet’s appeared in between 1952 and 1988, they were able to win six of them. 

Before disbanding in 1992, the Soviet’s were able to rack up 64 gold medals, significantly  more than the 36 gold medals the United States had received. 

However, nowadays the United States dominates in track and field. From Allyson Felix and her 11 Olympics medals to Usain Bolt and his two Olympic records, the U.S. puts the rest of the world to shame.

Track and field – the sport that started all other sports – is a competition that appears to only gain in popularity as it ages. It will be exciting to see what records the U.S. takes down in the near future.