History Of Athletics
How Everything Began
The history of athletics its roots in human prehistory. The first recorded organized athletics events at a sports festival
are the Ancient Olympic Games. At the first Games in 776 BC in Olympia, Greece, only one event was contested: the stadion
footrace and the first olympic winner was Koroibos. In later years further running competitions have been added. Also in
the Ancient Olympic pentathlon, four of the events are part of the track and field we have even today. The long jump, the
javelin throw, the discus throw and the stadion foot race.
Athletics events were also present at the Panhellenic Games in Greece around this period, and they become known to Rome
in 200 BC. In the Middle Ages new track and field events began developing in parts of Northern Europe. The stone put and
weight throw competitions popular among Celtic societies were precursors to the modern shot put and hammer throw events.
Also the pole vault, was polular in the Northern European Lowlands in the 18th century.
Modern competitions in athletics, took place for the first time in the 19th century. Usually they were organised by educational
institutions, military organisations and sports clubs as competitions between rival establishments. In these competitions
the hurdling were introduced for the first time.
Also, in the 19th century the first national associations have been established and organized the first national competitions.
In 1880 the Amateur Athletic Association of England start organizing the annual AAA Championships while in United States
in 1876 took place for the first time the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships first by the New York Athletic Club.
The establishment of the modern Olympic Games in Athens at 1896 marked a new era 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 events of track and field have been expanded in the following
In 1912 the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) was established, becoming the international governing body for
athletics, having the amateurism as one of its founding principles for the sport. The first continental track and field
competition was the 1919 South American Championships followed by the European Athletics Championships in 1934. In the 1928
Summer Olympics women competed for the first time.Furthermore, major athletics competitions for disabled athletes were first
introduced at the 1960 Summer Paralympics.
From the 1960s, the athletics gained more exposure through television coverage. After over half a century of amateurism,
the amateur status of the sport began to be displaced by growing professionalism in the late 1970s. In 1982 The IAAF
abandoned amateurism, and later changed its name as the International Association of Athletics Federations. The following
year IAAF established the World Championships in Athletics – the first ever global competition for athletics which became
one of track and field's most prestigious competitions along with the Olympics.
The IAAF World Championships in Athletics became a fully professional competition with the introduction of prize money in
1997. Also in 1998 the IAAF Golden League increased the professionalism of athletics. In 2010, the series was replaced by the
more lucrative IAAF Diamond League which comprises meetings in Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East which are the
first ever worldwide annual series of track and field meetings.
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