There's a common misconception that the consistently
anti-clockwise use of oval athletics tracks is down to the ancient Greeks. It
isn't!!!
According to Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek History at the
University of Cambridge, at Olympia and elsewhere in Greece both the running
track and the hippodrome (horse-race track) were straight, using up-and-back
"laps".
In early modern Olympics - Athens (1896 and 1906), Paris (1900),
St Louis (1904) - athletes ran clockwise. This was changed to "left-hand
inside" after that (apart from the 1908 London Olympic Marathon, which was
switched so that the Royal Family could get a better view).
At the time of the 1896 Games, some but not all track races in
England were run clockwise. It's thought that Baron de Coubertin, who founded
the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894, might have formed some of
his ideas on how to run the Games on ideas based on trips to England.
He visited Much Wenlock in Shropshire - acknowledged as being a
birthplace of the modern Olympics - where races were originally run clockwise.
Oxford and Cambridge University were both important in athletics
and both ran clockwise - Oxford until the late 1940s and Cambridge until the
1950s.
In Oxford it seemed
logical to run clockwise because of local geography, says Jon Roycroft,
director of sport at the university.
"One of the early
courses was a three lap to a mile track - it went down into a dip and it made
sense to run downwards."
So how did anti-clockwise
become standard?
According to Running Through
the Ages by Edward Seldon Sears, in the 20th Century a number of countries
began to settle 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 running had
become the norm by the early 1900s and Olympic organisers came under pressure
to conform.
According to The History
of Oxford's Athletics Club, in April 1948, Roger Bannister, who became
president of the athletics at Oxford, said of the athletic track at Iffley
Road: "I would not rest until plans were started to replace the old third
mile track with a new six-lane, 440 yards track conforming to international
specifications."
"It changed sometime
between 1950 and 1954 and Bannister's four-minute mile was run in the
anti-clockwise direction," says Roycroft.
But does running this
anti-clockwise make a difference to left or right-legged athletes? Not really,
says retired British sprinter John Regis.
"I am right legged -
but it wasn't something that came into my mind. It was just part of the sport,
you were just trained to run that way. My right leg is a bit stronger and it
does a bit more work but not so that any strain is put on either leg."
There are a host of other
theories about the domination of anti-clockwise running. Most people are
right-handed and some surmise it is easier for them to run anti-clockwise. For
most people the right leg is the strongest, with it therefore making sense that
the strongest leg covers the slightly longer distance.
You will even hear people
contend that the direction of the Earth's rotation makes it faster to run that
way - in the northern hemisphere at least.
