Olympic
Athletics

The Original Olympic Sport

When the modern Games opened in Athens on 6 April 1896, the first final decided was an athletics final: the American James Connolly won the triple jump and became the first Olympic champion in more than fifteen centuries. The programme that day was tiny by current measures — twelve events, sixty-three athletes from nine nations, all of them men — and the United States took nine of the twelve titles. Every event except the marathon was held inside the Panathenaic Stadium.

Athletics has been on the programme of every Summer Games since. No Olympics has ever been staged without it, and a core of twelve events — the triple jump among them — has been contested at every single edition. Over 128 years that dozen grew into today's forty-eight, and the sixty-three men became 1,810 athletes of both sexes in Paris.

Forty-Eight Golds, One Map

The current programme — as raced at Paris 2024, the most recent Games — is 48 medal events: 23 for men, 23 for women and two mixed relays. That equal count matters, because it had never happened before: Paris was the first Olympics with the same number of men's and women's athletics events, after the men's 50 km race walk gave way to the marathon race walk mixed relay.

The two mixed events are the newest layer of the sport. The mixed 4×400 m entered at Tokyo 2020, where Poland won its first running; the marathon race walk mixed relay arrived at Paris 2024, and Spain's Álvaro Martín and María Pérez won it in 2:50:31, almost a minute clear of Ecuador. A third mixed event, the 4×100 m relay, has been approved for its Olympic debut at LA28.

Half the Programme, Built Slowly

Women first competed in Olympic athletics at Amsterdam 1928, with five events: the 100 m, the 4×100 m relay, the high jump, the discus and the 800 m. Poland's Halina Konopacka won the discus and with it the first women's athletics gold in Olympic history. Germany's Lina Radke won the 800 m — and then that distance disappeared from the women's programme for 32 years, not returning until Rome 1960.

The rest of the programme was added piece by piece across nearly a century. The first women's Olympic marathon was run at Los Angeles 1984 and won by Joan Benoit of the United States. Full numerical parity — 23 events each — only arrived at Paris 2024. The stadium sessions themselves make no distinction: men's and women's finals share every evening.

How a Gold Gets Won

Getting to the Games takes either an entry standard — a mark set by World Athletics for each event — or a high enough place in the world rankings. Once there, track athletes work through rounds: heats, then semifinals, then a final of eight in the sprints and hurdles, larger in the distance races. Field athletes jump or throw in a qualifying round, and the best advance to a final. In the combined events there is no second chance at all: ten disciplines in two days for the decathletes, seven for the heptathletes, and the points table is the race.

Paris 2024 added a new step. In the individual track events from 200 m to 1500 m, hurdles included, anyone who missed automatic qualification from the heats got a second race — the repechage round — to fight for the remaining semifinal places. It replaced the old system of rescuing the fastest losers by time, and it guarantees every athlete in those twelve events at least two races at the Games. The 100 m keeps its own extra layer instead: a preliminary round before the heats.

Records That Only Fall at the Games

An Olympic record can only fall at an Olympics — one chance every four years — and the oldest of them all belongs to Bob Beamon: 8.90 m in the long jump at Mexico City on 18 October 1968, never bettered at a Games in more than half a century. Guinness lists it as the longest-standing Olympic record in athletics, twelve years clear of the next one. Florence Griffith-Joyner's 21.34 in the 200 m, from Seoul 1988, remains the women's benchmark of the same kind.

World records fall at the Games too. In Paris, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone won the 400 m hurdles in 50.37, breaking her own world record for the gold — a mark that still leads the event today. The season around those Games is a story of its own; our France 2024/25 season file covers the home side of it.

The medal table has its own ceilings. Paavo Nurmi of Finland collected twelve Olympic medals between 1920 and 1928, still the athletics record, and his nine golds have been equalled only by Carl Lewis, who won nine across 1984–1996 — four of them in the long jump alone. Usain Bolt swept the 100 m and 200 m at three straight Games from 2008 to 2016 and finished with eight golds, after the 2008 4×100 m title was disqualified years later over a teammate's doping case.

What a Gold Pays Now

For most of Olympic history the answer was: nothing. The IOC awards no prize money, and the sport spent its first decades formally amateur. That changed in April 2024, when World Athletics became the first international federation to pay for Olympic medals: US$50,000 for each of the 48 golds in Paris, from a US$2.4 million pot funded out of its share of IOC revenues, with relay teams splitting the same figure.

World Athletics has also announced a commitment to extend the payments, on a tiered scale, to silver and bronze medallists at LA28. Even so, the Olympic title remains the one prize in the sport whose value has never depended on the cheque attached to it.

Next Stop: The Coliseum, a Third Time

The next Olympic athletics programme runs at Los Angeles 2028, from 14 to 30 July, in the Memorial Coliseum — the first stadium to host Olympic track and field three times, after 1932 and 1984. The published schedule breaks with a century of habit: athletics opens in the first week instead of closing the Games, and for the first time it spans the entire Olympic period, thirteen days of competition from 15 July, with the marathons back in their traditional closing slot on the final weekend.

Day one belongs to the women's 100 m, chosen by the organisers to open the athletics programme. The event list adds the mixed 4×100 m relay, making its Olympic debut after being run at the World Relays and at the sport's new Ultimate Championship. Who lines up in any of it will be decided across the 2027–28 qualifying window — and predictions are not what this series does.

Federation Kit: The Olympic Rule

One rule shapes everything we collect: at the Games, athletes compete in the uniform of their national federation, not in their sponsor's racing colours. An Olympic final is the biggest stage federation kit ever gets — the same Nike USA, adidas France and Joma Spain team-issue lines whose athlete versions live in our archive.

Federation kit · host seasonAdidas France Pro Elite 2024/2025 Women T-Shirtadidas France women's tee from the 2024/25 federation cycle — the team-issue line France wore in the season it hosted the Games.150,00 €View piece →