Athletics schedule and results »

Athletics

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Athletics is the biggest of the Olympic sports, and can lay claim to being the seed from which the Olympics oak tree grew.

Running events were a feature of the earliest of the ancient Olympics, and have been a constant in the Games ever since.

At their most basic, the four disciplines which make up athletics - track, field, road and combination events - involve running (or walking), throwing or jumping - or a combination of the three.

Many of the blue-ribbon events at any Olympics are on the athletics program, from the 100 metres sprint to the 1,500 metres and the decathlon.

Athletics represents sport at its most pure. Equipment plays only a minor role (except in the case of 400m runner and double amputee Oscar Pistorius) - the contest is won or lost according to the skill of the competitors alone.

Whoever is fastest will win the track events, whoever can throw or jump or hurl or leap the farthest will win the field events, and the best allround athlete will win the combination events - the decathlon and heptathlon.

Some of the greatest athletes of all time have made their names at Olympic meets - Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis, Paavo Nurmi, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Emil Zatopek among them.

Events range from the 100m - taking less than 10 seconds to decide - to the marathon which is fought out over more than two hours.

The programs for men and women are slightly different, but the women's schedule has come to resemble the men's more and more closely over the past two decades