Physics and the Olympics :: Sport Sports Olympic Competition

The Olympics are fabled to have originated from a Greek myth, in which Hercules won a lean at Olympia, a plain in the small state of Elis, and then decreed that the race should be enacted every four eld. The much likely story is that the Olympic festival was a local religious event until 884 BC, when Iphitus, the king of Elis, contumacious to turn it into a broader festival. To accomplish that, he entered into a temporary cease-fire with other rulers, allowing athletes and others to travel peacefully to Olympia while the festival was sacking on. In 776 BC, the Greeks based their chronology on four-year periods, called Olympiads, and the Olympic festival marked the stock 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 supreme maximum. All Olympic sports have experienced major changes over the years, that here I will discuss a few of the more than famous Olympic events the 100-meter dash, the javelin throw, and the pole vault. The Greeks actually had a sprint of some 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 facilitate the runner on his return back up the track. Races originally began with the athletes stand up upright, with their toes resting in grooves in a stone take leaveing sill - hence the fount toe the line. False starts were punished by flogging from a judge standing behind the athletes. Later it seems that a starting admittance (called the husplex) was used, much like that used in horse-racing today.In the modern Olympics, sprinters start from a crouching position, budgeing against starting blocks to help them accelerate. Blocks were introduced in the juvenile twenties 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 amend strain-gauge version that worked quite well was introduced in about 1993, and two years later an intelligent version was developed.