Which would place your head… 
As others have pointed at, no. The fastest man in the world (or ten) were probably nowhere near the 1896 Olympics arena.
In addition to a vastly bigger world population (ie. number of people genetically inclined to run very fast) now, even developing countries today have extensive athletics programs cherry-picking the very best national runners and sending them competing and training abroad. The fastest people in the world really are running in today’s competitions. Not so in 1896.
I have seen the 1896 Stadium, the 100m dash had a very sharp turn at one point. That probably influenced the reletivly slow timings. And secondly on the issue of 1896 and the best atheltes, it should be recalled that sports at the time was not as it is now, participation in active competition was at that time something which only the gentry could do (for the most part). So many of the worlds best were in Athens.
It is highly unlikely the 1896 100 metres was run round a bend.
Wikipedia has two clear photos of the Panathinaiko Stadium. This source, confirmed elsewhere, gives the track length (204.07 metres) and width (33.35 metres).
It’s pretty clear that it’s just as easy to run a straight 100 metres down that track as it is at any other Olympic stadium used since 1896. In fact, it would be possible to run a straight 192 metres on it, as competitors used to do in the ancient Olympics, as recorded in the first paragraph in there.
I’m surprised nobody has pointed to the elephant in the living room.
The 1896 Olympics were a lily-white affair!
At any recent Olympics, you’ll find that nearly ALL of the top sprinters are black men of African descent.
The times were slow for a lot of reasons in 1896, but the biggest reason is that the vast majority of the world’s fastest runners weren’t competing.
On a related topic, I was always bemused by the fact that my 100m freestyle swimming time was fast enough in 1986 (my high school senior year) to win the Olympics from 1896 through 1920.
(In 1924, Johnny Weissmuller of Tarzan fame was the first Olympic swimmer to beat my fastest 100m freestyle time. He beat the 2nd-place finisher by a full two seconds. My fastest 100m time was one second behind Weissmuller, so my time would have earned me a Silver Medal in 1924. By 1928, all Olympic medalists were faster than me.)
What’s strange about this is that I was never a world-class swimmer by any stretch of the imagination. I swam competitively for just 3 years in high school. In 1986, I was fast enough to place in the top three in my local high school conference, but did not finish in the top three in the Sectional match. I never made it to the State meet.
So how could I have swum faster than the Olympic winners for a 24-year stretch a few decades previously? 
It gets stranger. The 1904 Olympics was conducted in open water. One of the events was the 1-mile swim. The results for this race had times slower than I swam for an open water mile swim just a few months ago, and I am not in nearly as good shape as I was in high school. (Today I’m just a 40-year old occasional swimmer who swims a couple of times a week.)
(BTW, the standard explanation is that improved training and swimming techniques have dramatically improved swimming times over the years.)
I’d say this is because you swam a 100 yard race and not a 100 meter race. I’m pretty sure that in the US all high school teams swim meets in yards pools. Summer leagues, which usually aren’t high school teams, might do long course meets which would be in 50 meter pools. Weissmuller’s times would still be enough to get him in the top 10 in US Maters records for most age groups from 18 on up.
I can swim a :58 100 yard race, which in a long course pool comes out to be a 1:06-07 time. So even my times would not have won anything in the Olympics, 1896 or not.
I wonder if the OP is confusing meters with yards, I always thought that in the US almost everything done in high school sports was done in yards, but I never did track. I’ll have to ask my wife and see what she says.
No–that’s not it. I was actually converting my times from 100 yards to 100 meters. (Which, granted, introduces its own problems because the 100 meter race is inherently longer, but it’s the only way to compare my times to that of the Olympic results.)
Anyway, my fastest 100-yd freestyle was 55.10 seconds, competed on a short course. Ignoring the short vs. long course distinction, and assuming I could maintain the same pace for a 100-m race, my time corresponds to a 1:00.26 100-meter freestyle time. As I stated, this is faster than the winner of the Olympics through 1920. I grant that it’s not entirely a fair comparison because of the short vs. long course distinction, and open water vs. a pool, but on the other hand, I’m no Olympic-class swimmer, either.
Besides, if you go back to the 1896 Olympics, it’s no comparison. The gold medal winner for the 100-meter freestyle won with a time of 1:22.2. You could have won that year, too. 
Incidentally, the swimming events in the 1904 Olympics were actually measured in yards, but were also conducted in open water (in an artificial lake).
Fascinating thread this.
I’ve looked at the mens marathon results for the 1896 games. If you compare them to the 2009 London marathon, there are 855 runners who would have beaten the winners time, 1,282 who would have beaten the silver medalist, and 1,316 who would have beaten the bronze.
Also 31 women who beat the winner, 77 the silver, and 80 the bronze.
Admittedly, it’s 2.2km longer these days. But still…
There are schools here in Virginia who use meter pools and thus compete at metric distances (short course). I’ve even seen one pool that used a 33.33 yard standard.
I too suspect the OP is mixing yards and meters. Typically the US uses YARDS for its measurements while the rest of the world uses some odd, made up, unit called the METER (or even METRE…!?) Nobody knows why. This constantly causes problems for Americans and so the rest of the world should just cut it out.
Nah. You can find plenty of schoolboy 100m races in the US, listed online (seriously, officially timed stuff, state meets, and the like), and 12 flat would be a truly mediocre time in all of them. I mean, a 12 second 100m dash is the kind of time that a pretty good high school athlete runs, not anything remarkable. It’s a varsity time, but it’s not a particularly impressive one. If you go to any high school track meet in the country, you’d be pretty safe betting that you’d see a sub-12 second 100m that day, assuming they race a 100m race.
To make the California High School state meet in the 100m, it seems boys have to run a 10.74. That’s fast. Really fast, apparently approximately equivalent in difficulty to a 4:15 mile, but still…it’s achievable by a decent number of high school athletes in CA. 12 seconds…that’s easy-ish. Probably about as common as a 5:30 mile.
You should try using an online converter, that gives a conversion for the 55.1 a 1:01.5 for short course and 1:03.85 for long course. Still you’d be winning quite a lot of Olympics! I’ve found that conversion tool to be pretty close, at least for me.
Well I can do that in practice, maybe I should invent a time machine and get me a gold!
I thought at least one Olympics was done in yards, I just didn’t see it when I was looking. I’ve seen film of some of them, they even do the open turns and everything. I wonder what they could do with even just a pair of jammers and goggles.
Anyone knows how many people actually ran under 10.00?
Since the introduction of electronic timing in 1968, 70 athletes have legally broken the 10 second barrier.
There’s a list of them here. Note that it records only the first time an athlete ran under 10 seconds, thus for example Usain Bolt is listed as the 58th runner to achieve this feat with a time of 9.92 seconds on 17 May 2008.
I’ve not read the rest of the thread, but I’m guessing it has something to with wet galoshers!
That’s a neat converter!
Using this converter from short-course yards to long-course meters, I would have only won gold up to 1908, and would have gotten a silver in 1912. By 1920 (no games in 1916), I would have been off the medal stand, having just missed a bronze medal by 0.65 seconds.
It’s still amazing to me that average high-school swimmers would be getting comparable times just 65 years later.
Great link mate. Briefly looked at the flags and then I saw aussie flag and I went WTF. Top sprint is African roots people domain. We all know that. As I thought, it sure to be some kind of a mixed race or Aborigine.
But Wiki agrees. They confirm one mixed Aborigine/White mentioned in previous paragraph in that club. And a fast honkie among the elite (Polish, and some time ago and not fully confirmed) not on that list. Not to take my racism elements seriously, just being little surprised, since there I do not recall any blond people in sprint finals since I am born.
You are incorrect. See for yourself: http://www.dyestatmetro.com/?pg=reg1-2009-Outdoor-NY-Section-4-Qualifier
Of note: in the semifinals, of the 24 runners, ONLY 4 ran slower than 12 seconds. And we are talking about an area with lots of small, rural towns – not exactly a competitive area for sprinting.
If I was asking why nobody ran under 10 seconds that would be more relevant. I’m asking why trained athletes in the prime of their life (I know that due to the nature of the event, they weren’t the fastest runners of their day – who cares, they were still trained athletes), couldn’t run faster than a slow high school kid.