I would venture to suggest that timekeeping may have played a part also.
I doubt that it was all that accurate, and if it was manual, may have been out by a good amount
The IAAF ratified the first official 100 metre world record at 10.6 sec in 1912.
Before that, several athletes were reported to have run 10.8 sec, this being the unofficial world record going into the 1896 games. The top bananas at this distance in 1896 were Bernie Wefers (US) and Charles Bradley (GB). The reasons for their absence in Athens were probably financial, but information concerning these two athletes is pretty thin on the ground.
In some cases at least, it was merely a matter of who wanted to go and could afford the trip.
One of the original members of the IOC was the Swede Viktor Balck. His strategy for building the Swedish Olympic team for Athens went like this:
The British didn’t seem to be push that hard for representatives, either.
Incidentally, the student happened to have his tennis raquets with him so he entered the tournament and won it.
O tempora o mores.
Link.
One poster already mentioned that the timing probably wasn’t that accurate. Another factor is that the athletes may not have been using the modern starting position. I’m not sure when it came into use. The film Gallipoli (set in WW1) has runners using a mix of crouched and standing starts for the sprint, don’t know if that is authentic.
According to his wiki page the winner was using a crouch start, although it was rare at the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Burke_(athlete)
In the 1900 olympics the winner posted a time of 10.8 seconds in a heat, so the slow times in 1896 were probably down the calibre of the competitors.
I’d also question the timing of the informal event mentioned in the OP. How did you time it down to 100ths of a second? Who timed it? I’d bet there’s a decent margin of error there, too.
Mark Dyreson’s book Making the American team: sport, culture, and the Olympic experience tells the story of how the US team of 13 or 14 was recruited.
US participation in Athens was driven by William Milligan Sloane, a professor of history at Princeton and the US member on the IOC. The team comprised four athletes from Princeton, five from the Boston Athletics Association (BAA), one from the Suffolk Athletic Club (SAC), two US Army captains, and a swimmer of unknown origin. This adds up to 13, but other sources give 14.
The American Olympic Committee, formed in 1893, played no part in organising or financing the team. The Princeton contingent was funded by a wealthy anonymous donor, possibly one Robert Garrett. The BAA (including the SAC member) raised some funds from its membership but was ultimately bankrolled by a stockbroker, with guarantees from the Governor of Massachusetts.
The adventures of the US team in Athens are chronicled between pages 40-50.
Stopwatches of those days were only capable of timing to within 1/5th of a second.
Just my WAG as well, but I think the tracks back then were all cinders. Must surely be quicker running on a modern hard surface. Maybe a second per 100m?
For the record, they were running on grass, and not the nice, even playing-field type grass that most people would associate today with athletics competition. Flat ground, certainly, but not manicured to a level surface.
I believe that the sprints were also run from a standing start at the time. Later, when the crouch start became popular, racers would bring a small hand-shovel to carve a starting block out of the turf.
I recall watching some of the film footage of Jesse Owen at Berlin in 1936 during the recent Championships and it showed the sprinters digging holes for their feet in the cinder track at the starting line. According to this Britannica article, the use of starting blocks were legalized in the 1930’s, so the first Olympic track events with blocks must have been at London in 1948.
You’d have to have hated running in the 400m a day later…
Now that I think about it, I think there’s a scene of people digging starting blocks in Chariots of Fire which was set in, what, 1920? 1924?
I don’t remember whether it was on grass or cinder, though.
Checking Wikipedia, it says that the winner of the race was the only one to use the newfangled “crouch start”, which necessitated a ruling. No word on starting blocks, but it’s a reasonable assumption to make that they weren’t in use.
The running surface at the Athens (1896) stadium was certainly loose cinders. I believe every Olympic stadium up to and including Tokyo (1964) used a similar surface. Mexico (1968) was the first Olympic venue to feature a synthetic rubber track.
I think you misunderstood the original post. The informal race between myself and the student was not timed at all. After the race, I looked at the fact that (1) the student had beat me by a narrow margin, and (2) the student had run an officially timed 11.78 a week earlier. From this, I inferred that I would quite possibly be able to run a time under 12 as well.
I love that story, just because it’s so far removed from the intensity of the current games.
“Hey, I’m British, too! Can I be on the team?”
“Sure, why not. By the way, you don’t happen to have a tennis racquet, do you?”
In addition to what everyone else said:
- 1st Olympics; not a big deal. Most competitors probably never heard of it.
- If they did, It was 1896. Can’t just book your tickets on Orbitz. Would require a many weeks long journey by ship just to get there, again for a nothing competition.
- You would have to be independently wealthy to make the trip.
It would be like if we started the Doper Games next year and all of us showed up, began drinking, and ran the races. Who could imagine that in 113 years the Doper Games will be THE pinnacle track and field event in the entire world? And then they look at our times and can’t understand why…
For those who used Chariots of Fire to research, there is a pretty good miniseries from 1984 called The First Olympics: Athens 1896. I’m sure it takes historical liberties, but it’s entertaining and includes several of the points mentioned here. Tom Burke’s use of the crouching start is portrayed as being inspired by the action of a revolver.
The cast includes David Odgen Stiers, Louis Jourdan, Angela Lansbury, and a young David Caruso. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and elsewhere.
Well, it certainly seems as if lack of top competition accounts for part of the explanation. But it really wasn’t like the Doper games. Suppose instead of the best sprinter in the world, the only people who showed up were the 257th best, the 300th best, and the 574th best. They were still trained runners, right? Based on my experience, I’m still surprised they didn’t get less than 12 seconds. But perhaps I’m underestimating the effect that track surface, shoes, etc. would have.
It would be interesting to take an athlete with a known time on a modern track with modern shoes, etc. and then see how much his time increased while subjected to conditions that replicate the first Olympics.
That and the thin air were some of the reasons why in the long jump, Bob Beamon improved the world record by such a margin that the tool to measure the jumps that day was not long enough to measure his amazing jump.
A fact often overlooked amid the excitement concerning Beamon’s prodigious leap in Mexico is that the previous world triple jump record was improved five times by three different athletes.