Track & Field

Track and field is one of the oldest of sports. Athletic contests were often held in conjunction with religious festivals, as with the Olympic Games of ancient Greece. For 11 centuries, starting in 776 B.C., these affairs — for men only — were enormously popular and prestigious events. The Romans continued the Olympic tradition until the time of the Emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, who banned the Games in A.D. 394. During the Middle Ages, except for a short-lived revival in 12th-century England, organized track and field all but disappeared. The true development of track and field as a modern sport started in England during the 19th century. English public school and university students gave the sport impetus through their interclass meets, or meetings as they are still called in Britain, and in 1849 the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst held the first organized track and field meet of modern times.

Not until the 1860s, however, did the sport flourish. In 1866 the first English championships were held by the newly formed Amateur Athletic Club, which opened the competition to all "gentlemen amateurs" specifically, athletes who received no financial compensation for their efforts. This code has lasted to the present day and is the basis of the rules governing the sport. The Amateur Athletic Club gave way to the Amateur Athletic Association in 1880, which has conducted the annual national championships since that date. Although meets were held on the North American continent as early as 1839, track and field first gained popularity in the late 1860s, after the formation of the New York Athletic Club in 1868. The Amateur Athletic Union of the United States (AAU), an association of track and field clubs, was formed in 1887 and has governed the sport in the United States since then. https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/track-and-field/