A great weekend of Olympic Sport and well done to ‘TeamGB’ on their medal tally so far, although I understand from an Australian friend of mine that actually ‘Silver is the new Gold’!
Watching Mo Farah on Saturday
night, I wondered why do they always run round the track in an anti-clockwise
direction? And, thanks to the BBC, here’s
the answer:
According to a certain Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek
History at the University of Cambridge, at Olympia and elsewhere in Greece both
the running track and the hippodrome were straight, using up-and-back
"laps" and even in the early modern Olympics - Athens (1896 and
1906), Paris (1900), St Louis (1904) - athletes ran clockwise.
At the time of the 1896 Games, most track races in England
were also run clockwise and at Oxford and Cambridge University, both important athletic institutions, races also ran
clockwise (Oxford until the late 1940s and Cambridge until the 1950s)
But a number of countries began to settle instead on the
American custom of running counter-clockwise...
One theory is that early races
were run on horse tracks, which ran in that direction.
Anti-clockwise became
the norm by the early 1900s and the Olympic organisers came under pressure to
conform. The change was compete world-wide between between 1950 and 1954 and
Roger Bannister's four-minute mile was
run in the anti-clockwise direction.
So we have the Americans to thank it seems – but does
running anti-clockwise make a difference to left or right-legged athletes?
Answers on a postcard please.
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