Physics and the Olympics

The Olympics are fabled to have originated from a Greek myth, in which Hercules won a race at Olympia, a plain in the small state of Elis, and then decreed that the race should be enacted every four years. The more likely story is that the Olympic festival was a local religious event until 884 BC, when Iphitus, the king of Elis, decided to turn it into a broader festival. To accomplish that, he entered into a temporary truce with other rulers, allowing athletes and others to travel peacefully to Olympia while the festival was going on. In 776 BC, the Greeks based their chronology on four-year periods, called Olympiads, and the Olympic festival marked the beginning of each Olympiad.

Today, the Olympics are still held every four years, and advanced in technology and fitness training have enhanced world records to the absolute maximum. All Olympic sports have experienced major changes over the years, but here I will discuss a few of the more famous Olympic events; the 100-meter dash, the javelin throw, and the pole vault.

The Greeks actually had a sprint of about 190 metres called the stadion in the ancient Olympics, which was a sprint down a straight track and back again. The technology of the day consisted of nothing more than a wooden post at one end to help the runner on his return back up the track. Races originally began with the athletes standing upright, with their toes resting in grooves in a stone starting sill - hence the expression "toe the line". False starts were punished by flogging from a judge standing behind the athletes. Later it seems that a starting gate (called the husplex) was used, much like that used in horse-racing today.

In the modern Olympics, sprinters start from a crouching position, pushing against starting blocks to help them accelerate. Blocks were introduced in the late 1920s and were first used at the 1948 Olympic games in London. Instrumented starting blocks appeared in the early 1980s, and consisted of a spring plate and a microswitch. In the late 1980s units based on strain gauges emerged, although they were very sensitive to the push of the athlete against them and caused many wrong false starts in competitive races. An improved strain-gauge version that worked quite well was introduced in about 1993, and two years later an "intelligent" version was developed.