Athletics at the 2020 Summer Olympics were held during the last ten days of the Games. They were due to be held from 31 July – 9 August 2020, at the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, Japan. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the games were postponed to 2021, with the track and field events set for 30 July – 8 August.[1] The sport of athletics at these Games was split into three distinct sets of events: track and field events, remaining in Tokyo, and road running events and racewalking events, moved to Sapporo. A total of 48 events were held, one more than in 2016, with the addition of a mixed relay event.[2]
Olympic stadium and venues
Olympic Stadium
Road events (marathons and racewalks) took place at Odori Park in Sapporo, but the National Stadium, which was known as the Olympic Stadium during the games, completely rebuilt and inaugurated on 21 December 2019, was the venue of all the track and field events.[3][4]
Italian company Mondo equipped the stadium with a new track, a Mondotrack WS surface which was given a seal of approval with a World Athletics "Class 1 certificate" in December 2019. The Mondotrack WS surface in Tokyo's National Stadium is an better and updated version of the track that was provided and installed for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil.[5]
Due to the risk of a heat wave during the period of the Games, the IOC, Organizing Committee and IAAF decided in October 2019 that the Race Walking and Marathon events would be moved to
Sapporo, which hosted the 1972 Winter Olympics.The north island lies 800 km from Tokyo. The chosen route started and arrived at the
Odori Park is the traditional venue of Hokkaido Marathon until 2012. This decision, taken before COVID-19 pandemic, was made due to fears about high Its route features a large loop which is about the length of a half-marathon (21,095 km), followed by a second smaller loop (10,540 km) which was completed twice.[6]
Schedule
Apart from the race walks and marathon, nine track and field events will hold finals in the morning session to ensure that they receive maximum visibility for the sport across all time zones.[7][8] On 16 October 2019, the IOC announced that there were plans to re-locate the marathon and racewalking events to Sapporo due to heat concerns.[9] The plans were made official on 1 November 2019 after Tokyo GovernorYuriko Koike accepted the IOC's decision, despite her belief that the events should have remained in Tokyo.[10]
The 2020 athletics qualifying system for individual events was fundamentally different from previous versions. Instead of being only based on set qualifying standards, the new qualifying system is also based on IAAF World Rankings. Qualifying standards provided an alternate pathway, but are to be set high enough that only exceptional performances will meet them. Maximum entries per event were set (unlike previous years where entries were based on how many athletes met the qualifying standard), with the world rankings being used to fill the quota after the standards-based entrants and universality entrants are set.[12][13][14]
On 2 June 2021, Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, declared that "our tracking suggests that about 70 percent of athletes in most events will qualify by entry standard. This is above the 50 percent rate we aimed for in devising the system, but we believe this is due to the extended qualifying period created after the postponement of the Olympic Games from 2020 to 2021."[15]
For relays, the qualification is somewhat similar to previous years. Eight teams will be selected through the results at the 2019 World Championships in Athletics, then adding the finalists of 2021 World Athletics Relays if different ones and some more selected through top lists' rankings, up to 16 teams by event.[12][13]
Record figures
3 world records and 12 Olympic records were set.
28 continental (area) records were set along with 151 national ones.
According to the international governing body for the sport of athletics, World Athletics, their performance ranking system concludes that the 2020 Olympic Games were the "highest quality major event in history".[16]
* Indicates the athlete only competed in the preliminary heats and received medals.
Men's 4 × 100 On 18 February 2022 team of Great Britain was disqualified for doping use and officially stripped of the silver medal.[18] The medals were reallocated on 19 May 2022.[19]
The Placing table assigns points to the top eight athletes in the final, with eight points to first place, seven to second place, and so on until one point for eighth place. Teams or athletes that did not finish or were disqualified do not receive points.[20]
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