This route is considerably shorter, some 35 kilometres 22 mi , but includes a very steep initial climb of more than 5 kilometres 3. When the modern Olympics began in , the initiators and organizers were looking for a great popularizing event, recalling the ancient glory of Greece.
This idea was heavily supported by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, as well as by the Greeks. The Greeks staged a selection race for the Olympic marathon on 10 March that was won by Charilaos Vasilakos in 3 hours and 18 minutes with the future winner of the introductory Olympic Games marathon coming in fifth.
The marathon of the Summer Olympics revived the traditional route from Marathon to Athens, ending at Panathinaiko Stadium, the venue for the Summer Olympics. Per capita, the Kalenjin tribe of Rift Valley Province in Kenya have produced a highly disproportionate share of marathon and track-and-field winners. Contact us cismeurope bundeswehr. One of the greatest marathon runners of all time was Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, who became the first black African to win Olympic gold by winning the marathon in a world record time at the Rome Games.
Four years later he became the first man in history to successfully defend the title. All Lifestyle Performance Culture. Season Top Lists All time Top lists. Home of World Athletics. Share Tweet Email. King Taharka instituted a long distance race specifically to keep his army up to scratch.
The most accomplished runners, both within the military and in civilian society, served as messengers up to the beginning of the nineteenth century and, over rough country, were better than a horse. The tale upon which the modern Olympic Marathon rests is the mythic run of Pheidippides from Marathon to Athens. He was a professional messenger and, in BC, is supposed to have brought a message from the plains of Marathon, where the Greek Army had just won a crucial battle against the invading Persian Army of General Datis.
He did this, and no more, dropping dead with the delivery. There are many variations of this story, most of them more plausible than this version. The Greeks may have been victorious, but the battle had not been conclusive, as the rest of the Greek Army was marching towards Athens to forestall a Persian landing much closer to the city.
The most contemporaneous historian, Herodotus, wrote 50 years later that Pheidippides had been sent from Athens to Sparta, before the battle, to request help. The Spartathlon race, which is held today over a distance of km, commemorates this slightly more likely version of events.
De Coubertin was a Frenchman, who had grown up at a time of national shame. Trounced in the Franco-Prussian War, the French had lost national territory, been forced to pay reparations and forbidden a national army while Prussian troops occupied the country.
There followed a civil war which further weakened French national standing. On a tour of Britain he met William Brookes, founder of the Much Wenlock Olympic Society, which had already held its inaugural event in , followed up in and De Coubertin attempted both to make sport compulsory in French schools and to promote an international sporting festival also based upon the ancient Olympics. He launched his Olympic campaign in , and two years later formed the International Olympic Committee at the Sorbonne.
The delegates agreed to promote the first modern Olympics in in Athens, and subsequently at intervals of four years. One of the delegates was Michel Breal, who argued for a long-distance race as one of the events, and dusted off the hoary old story of Pheidippides in support. As has happened so often since, the authorities saw the Olympics as a means by which to galvanise national feeling.
The Royal Family became involved and contributions from the Greek diaspora poured in. Vast sums were expended in building a marble replica of the stadium at Olympia, and the first Olympic Marathon was run from Marathon Bridge to this stadium in Athens, over a distance of 40km. In the months leading up to the Olympic race there were several attempts to run this course.
In February two runners departed from Athens and completed the distance but one of them, foreshadowing many similar instances, took a ride for part of the way. A month before the Olympic race a Greek Championship event was held, in which 11 competitors ran from Marathon to Athens.
This was the first ever Marathon race. Two weeks later there was another, billed as an official trial and attracting 38 entrants. The winner recorded , and a water-carrier named Spiridon Louis finished fifth in On a separate occasion at that time two women, Melpomene and Stamathis Rovithi, were also reported to have run from Marathon to Athens.
Eighteen men lined up at the start of the first Olympic Marathon on 10 April Of the four foreign runners only Gyula Kellner, a Hungarian, had run the distance before as a time trial. The three others had run in the middle distances at the Games and were chancing to little more than luck that they would stay the course. The Greek organisers seemed better prepared, and had already made some arrangements which remain as standard practice to this day: refreshment stations were dotted along the course, a cavalry officer acted as a lead vehicle and soldiers were used as race marshals to keep the public off the course and assist stricken competitors.
The three foreign middle-distance runners lasted surprisingly well, retiring at 23km, 32km and 37km. Spridon Louis had taken the lead from the last of these, the Australian Edwin Flack, at about 33km. The starter, one Colonel Papadiamantopoulos, who seemed to be acting as race referee, then rode ahead to inform the waiting crowd in the stadium. Louis did not disappoint, and led by a literal mile as he entered the stadium to win in a time of Greeks took second and third until Kellner, who had come in fourth, protested that the third Greek, Spiridon Belokas, had taken a ride — something that was becoming almost common practice.
Nine runners finished the race. The Marathon was now established, perhaps better established than the Olympics themselves, whose next two showings in Paris and St Louis bordered on the farcical. The next Marathon was held only two months later, from Paris to the outlying town of Conflans. A century before, once running had ceased to be the most efficient means of relaying messages, those wealthy people who had employed couriers had discovered another purpose to running.
It provided an ideal spectacle upon which to lay bets. Races were arranged solely for this purpose throughout most of the nineteenth century. The clubs were put under the regulation of the Amateur Athletic Association, formed in Oxford in A stand-off developed in which De Coubertin was decidedly with the amateurs.
0コメント