History of Track & Field

Track and field is one of the few sports that is categorized as an individual sport with athletes challenging each other to decide a single champion. The sport consist of running, jumping, and throwing. Within the running events there are sprints, middle and long-distance events, relays, and hurdling. Regular jumping events include long jump, triple jump, high jump and pole vault and for throwing events there is the shot put, javelin, discus and hammer. Athletes who compete in a combination all of these events are called heptathlon and decathlon (six and ten events respectively).

Track and field events are among the oldest of all sporting competitions because the events are natural and universal forms of human physical expression. Athletic contests were often held in conjunction with religious festivals, as with the Olympic Games of ancient Greece. The first recorded Olympic Games occured in 776 BC in Olympia, Greece. For centuries after it was a sport for men only. The sport didn't begin to flourish until the 1860s and back then athletes received no financial compensation. In 1913 the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) was formed by representatives from sixteen countries. Its responsibility was establishing standard rules for the sport, approving world records, and ensuring that the amateur code was being followed; which it continues to carry out to this very day.

The participation of women in track and field is a relatively recent development. In 1921 representatives from six countries formed an athletic federation for women, which merged with the IAAF in 1936. Participation by women has grown rapidly in many countries in recent years, particularly in the United States, where many schools have added women's track and field to their athletic programs.

I chose to write about the history of track and field because I honestly believe that "one can''t know where they are going unless they know where they have been."