Track and field events at XXXI Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro
Фотографии:
ˑ:
Associate professor, Ph.D. O.M. Mirzoev1,2
1Russian State University of Physical Culture, Sport, Youth and Tourism (GTsOLIFK), Moscow
2Moscow State Institute of Culture, Moscow
Keywords: XXX/ XXXI Olympic Games, unofficial team standing, medals, nations, accomplishments, Russian track and field athletes, world records, national and Olympic records.
Background. The fourth Olympics in the new millennium, going under number of XXXI, took place on the South American continent for the first time in the history of Olympic movement. It was Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil (after San Paulo) that succeeded in 2009 competing with other applicant cities (Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago) and was nominated a host nation for the 2016 Olympics.
The Olympic accomplishments of individual athletes and teams in the track and field events give the reasons to consider the countries that lately have given a top priority to the “sports queen” and managed to make notable steps forward in a variety of aspects including, first of all, progress in the team standings and, on the other hand, the teams that lost their positions on the team scoreboard versus the last Olympics [3] and the two (2013 and 2015) World Championships that were the top-ranking sport events in the last Olympic four-year period [1].
Objective of the study was to analyse the final results and the unofficial team standings in the track and field events of the XXXI Olympic Games to identify the current global power relations in the sport discipline.
Study results and discussion. The Rio Olympics demonstrated clear enough that American track and field athletes today are largely beyond competition as the leaders in the team standings, and the domination is underlined by the team scores of their nearest competitors (Kenya and Jamaica) that are by far down on the scoreboard (see Table 1).
Table 1. Strongest national teams in the track and field events of the XXXI Olympic Games: unofficial team standings of the gold-winner teams (all events)
|
Place |
Nation |
Men |
Women |
Total |
|||||||||
|
G |
S |
B |
∑ |
G |
S |
B |
∑ |
G |
S |
B |
∑ |
||
|
1 |
USA |
7 |
5 |
4 |
15 |
6 |
5 |
5 |
16 |
13 |
10 |
9 |
32 |
|
2 |
Kenya |
3 |
3 |
-- |
6 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
7 |
6 |
6 |
1 |
13 |
|
3 |
Jamaica |
4 |
1 |
-- |
5 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
6 |
6 |
3 |
2 |
11 |
|
4 |
China |
1 |
1 |
1 |
3 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
3 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
6 |
|
5 |
SAR |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
1 |
1 |
-- |
2 |
2 |
2 |
-- |
4 |
|
6 |
UK |
2 |
-- |
1 |
3 |
-- |
1 |
3 |
4 |
2 |
1 |
4 |
7 |
|
7 |
Croatia |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
2 |
-- |
1 |
3 |
2 |
-- |
1 |
3 |
|
Germany |
2 |
-- |
1 |
3 |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
|||||
|
9 |
Ethiopia |
-- |
1 |
2 |
3 |
1 |
1 |
3 |
5 |
1 |
2 |
5 |
8 |
|
10 |
Canada |
1 |
1 |
3 |
5 |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
1 |
1 |
4 |
6 |
|
11 |
Poland |
-- |
1 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
3 |
|
12 |
Bahrein |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
1 |
1 |
-- |
2 |
1 |
1 |
-- |
2 |
|
Spain |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
|||||
|
14 |
Bahamas |
-- |
-- |
1 |
1 |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
1 |
-- |
1 |
2 |
|
15 |
Belgium |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
|
Brazil |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
|||
|
Columbia |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
|||
|
Greece |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
|||
|
Slovakia |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
|||
|
Tajikistan |
1 |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
|||
Note: G, S and B mean gold, silver and bronze medals
The final unofficial team standings show three national teams of the USA, Kenya and Jamaica leading – in the situation when the Russian national team was barred from competing in the events. Both the North American and African teams were also favourites of the last two (2013 and 2015) World Track and Field Championships [1].
The situation is somewhat different from the similar competitions of 2012 since the Kenya team made progress from number six to number two with the US and Jamaica holding the same places, and all the top three teams made progress on the gold score, albeit the US team was particularly successful in this aspect as it won seven gold medals in Rio versus three in London due to the great progress in mastery of the national athletes. As a result, the total team score has improved by three medals. Prior to the Rio Olympics, the US athletes traditionally dominated in sprint, relay races, hurdling races and some jumping events that heavily contributed to their top place in the team standings. In the Rio Games, however, the US team managed to expand the range of their special medals-yielding events since the men’s team won different medals in 11 events and the women’s team in 12 events. It may be pertinent to mention in this context M. Centrowitz, the 1500 meter race winner who was ahead of the competitors from the African countries traditionally leading in this event and took the Olympic gold. It was a glorious success for the US team after a long 106-year since the 1908 Olympics, albeit it should be noted that the winner’s time (3.50,00 s) was the worst result for the Olympic champions and runner-ups since the 1932 Olympics. In addition, it was for the first time in the modern history of Olympic Games that only one nation (US) won all the three medals in 100 m hurdles. Notable progress was made versus the 2012 Olympics in London by the national teams of China and SAR, whilst some former champions failed to win gold medals this time, including teams of France, Australia, Czech Republic and some others.
The Kenyan national team came to the Olympics as a recognized competitor aspiring and highly capable of taking the lead in the world athletics. However, these hopes were not fully justified in Rio. The team was traditionally successful in the endurance events including the 800, 1500, 5000 and 10000 meter races, 3000 meter hurdles and the marathon race where their main competitors from Ethiopia have been notably yielding their leadership for the last few years, and this regress was once again proved by the Rio Games. We should remind in this context the gorgeous success of two Kenyan athletes at the World Championship in China in the events that were considered non-traditional and less winnable by the team – the 400 m hurdles and javelin throw. And this success was not occasional as they proved at the Rio Olympics winning silver medals for the team (B. M. Tumuti in 400 m hurdling race with the national record of 47.78 s; and J. Yego with 88.24 m in javelin throw).
Whilst the leading Kenyan athletes still dominate in the general- and specific endurance-intensive track events, the Jamaican track-and-field school successfully defends its leading positions in the sprint and hurdling events and relay races. First serious success came to the national team of Jamaica in the 2005 (X) World Championship in Helsinki where the islanders won the fourth place in the team standings with 10 medals including 1 gold, 6 silver and 3 bronze. Since 2007 the Jamaican team has always been ranked among the top five nations in the World Championship standings. In 2009, 2011 and 2013 the team was among the top three nations on the unofficial team total scoreboards of the World Track and Field Championships. The team progress for the period since the 2000 Olympics shows that the national sprinters and hurdlers have successfully improved their mastery and rankings. The Jamaican team was ranked only 23rd in 2000 Olympics, but four years later skyrocketed to the seventh place, and then to the fourth, followed by the confident move up to the third place in the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games. It means that the team made an impressive progress in the millennium coming up to the top ranks of the global athletics. Its leadership was confirmed by 11 medals won in Brazil, all of them in the sprint events and hurdles.
Analysis of the Jamaican team accomplishments in the last Olympic cycle [1] shows that it was largely due to the contributions of such prominent sprinters as U. Bolt (21.08.1986) and S.A. Fraser-Pryce (27.12.1986) that the team rushed up to the top ranks of the global sports. It is verified by the fact that both of the athletes won five of the 11 team medals in Brazil, with U. Bolt making three victories in the 100 m and 200 m sprints and heavily contributing to the team success in the 4x100 m relay race; whilst S.A. Fraser-Pryce came third to the finish in the 100 m sprint event and won silver in the 4x100 m team relay race. The impressive track records of U. Bolt and S.A. Fraser-Pryce confirm their global leadership in the current Olympic cycle and have contributed much to the successes of the Jamaican team for the last few years. We have no doubts that in the new Olympic cycle of October 2016 to July 2020 the Jamaican national team will be as strong as for the last four years, at least in its special sprint events.
The above three leading teams joined in the top five thanks to one Asian and one African nation, with particularly high success on the world ranking table made by the SAR national team that was ranked only 22nd in the 2012 Olympics (where it won only one silver medal) but moved up to the 5th place in Rio. Good progress was also made by the Chinese team that took the fourth place in the team standings (a big step up versus the last Olympics) largely due to the success in the 20 km race walk.
It is the UK national team that confirmed its high rank at the 2015 World Championship in China and now may be rated the European strongest athletic team after the XXXI Olympics [1]. However, it would be premature to expect top success of the team on the global athletic arena for the reason that it was the only one and the same athlete who won gold for the team both at the 2013 World Championship in Moscow and 2015 World Championship in China, namely Mohamed "Mo" Farah (hailing from Sudan), the winner of the Olympic 5000 meters and 10000 meters. His track record in the Olympic cycles shows that he has been the single winner of gold for the British athletic team at every top-ranking athletic event for the last few years.
Going next behind the British team is the Croatian national team that managed to make it to the top ten strongest athletic teams of the planet for the first time in the modern Olympic history. The team success was solely due to the contribution of the women’s national team, with a special tribute payable to S. Kolak and S. Perkovic, winners of the javelin and discus throw events, respectively. We should also note the progress made by the Canadian athletes in Rio. Big step to success was made by the team at the 2015 (XV) World Championship where it won the 7th place marking a good team progress in preparations for the Olympics. The tenth place won by the team in Rio may be considered a great success as compared to the 34th place it had in the previous Olympic team standings. As for the Polish national team, one could expect it making success after the impressive results at the 2015 World Championship (6th place in the team standings) and 2016 European Championship (where the team was the first in the final team standings), but the Polish team competitive performance and success was largely the same as in the previous XXX Olympic Games in fact. It should also be noted that quite a few teams lost their positions on the world ranking list including the teams of France, Australia, Czech Republic, Turkey and some others. Worth special mentioning is the serious regress of the German national team in the Rio Olympics.
Some of the Rio Olympic gold winners were the single contributors of medals to their team standings, and in many cases it was only due to them that the national teams qualified as the winners of Olympic medals, including Kenya, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Bahrain, Bahamas, Tajikistan (by the way, hammer thrower D. Nazarov was the first athlete for the whole history of the country who won an Olympic gold for the national team), Algeria, Burundi, Grenada, Qatar and Trinidad and Tobago. The competitive success data may be interpreted as largely indicative of the overall popularity of track and field sports in these countries. It is also important that the XXXI Olympic Games enabled many athletes to show excellent results and make new records (Table 2).
Table 2. Records made in different track and field events at the XXXI Olympic Games
|
|
Group events |
Records |
|||||||||
|
World |
Olympic |
Continental |
National |
Seasonal1 |
|||||||
|
m |
w |
m |
w |
m |
w |
w |
m |
w |
w |
||
|
1 |
Sprint, hurdling and relay races |
1 |
-- |
-- |
-- |
4 |
-- |
27 |
13 |
4 |
4 |
|
2 |
Endurance events2 |
-- |
1 |
2 |
-- |
-- |
3 |
3 |
17 |
2 |
1 |
|
3 |
High-endurance events3 |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
6 |
-- |
-- |
-- |
|
4 |
Jumps |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
-- |
3 |
4 |
2 |
1 |
|
5 |
Throws |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
3 |
12 |
2 |
3 |
|
6 |
Combined events |
-- |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
-- |
1 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
|
Total |
1 |
2 |
4 |
1 |
6 |
4 |
43 |
48 |
11 |
10 |
|
Note: 1 2016 world best result for the group; 2 Group includes 800, 1500, 5000, 10000 and 3000 meter hurdles; 3 Group includes marathon race and 20km and 50km competitive walk events.
The Olympic record in hammer throw event scored by Polish women athlete A. Wlodarczyk, for instance, was not the first in her athletic career, whilst the Olympic records of two other athletes deserve special mentioning. Ethiopian women’s racer A. Ayana made a new Olympic record of 29.31,78 s breaking the previous Olympic record made as far back as in 1993 and won the 10000 meters with the time of 29.17,43 s. And the 24 years-old sprinter from SAR who entered the global athletic elite only in 2015 sensationally won the 400 meter race breaking the long-standing record of M. Johnson (43,18 s of 1999) by the new record of 43,03 s.
Conclusion. The athletic events at the XXXI Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro resulted in athletes of 42 national teams being awarded by Olympic medals (the same result was recorded in the Olympic Games in London). As for the Olympic gold medals, they were won by athletes of 19 countries as compared to the previous Olympics where gold was won by athletes of 24 nations. As had been expected before the events [1], two North American and one African nation confirmed their leadership at the Olympics as the best track-and-field nations of the world. It should be noted that the range of events won by the US national team (23) was wide enough as compared to the successes of the teams of Jamaica and Kenya that dominated only in the speed- and endurance events.
Resume. The study data give no account of the Russian national team’s contribution to the last Olympics for the reason that prior to the Olympic Games the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF, on June 17) and later on the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS, on June 21) barred the Russian Olympic team from competing in the global event in Brazil; and the IAAF formally qualified only one Russian athlete (long jumper D. Klishina) for competitions in Rio de Janeiro where she won the 9th place (6.63 m). The main reason for the controversial action, as reported by the IAAF, was the long-lasting abuse of prohibited pharmacological agents (based on a report by WADA – World Anti-Doping Agency) by the elite Russian track-and-field athletes.
Prior to that, on November 13, 2015, when a decision was worded on suspension of the Russian Athletic Federation (RAF) membership in the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF), the IAAF Board worked out an action plan to reinstate membership of a national athletic federation in the International Association of Athletic Federations. By summer 2016, the RAF completed every action of the above plan, but then the IAAF management (presided by Sebastian Coe at that time) hastily approved (in June, two months before the Olympics) a new amendment that could not be implemented even theoretically (for it required the Russian athletes to live a few years abroad to qualify for the Olympics). It is clear that the amendment made virtually senseless the professional activity of many elite athletes designed as a sequence of training cycles and competitions designed to make the athlete highly fit for the top-ranking event of the period as they lost the key motivator for the training and competition process. Being barred from competing in the climax event of the four-year period made the hard training process senseless for the elite athletes and teams. The Russian “sports queen” in general and its best and most devoted servants in particular were robbed of the Olympic Games. The hard labour of the coaching teams, elite athletes and sport specialists was made senseless and fruitless in this Olympic cycle. The blow was particularly heavy and ruthless for those elite athletes for whom it was the last chance to compete in the Olympics for they will be unable for a variety of reasons to compete in the next 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. It might well be that this event marked a new, totally different stage in the modern history of the Russian track-and-field sports [2].
Summarizing the above and other controversial actions of the summer 2016 geared to isolate the Russian sports, we have all reasons to assume that the Olympic, Paralympic and other sport movements in the world are now controlled by politics and ... WADA rather that the International Olympic and Paralympic Committees and other relevant international sport federations and agencies. It might well be that the time has come to introduce new meanings and terms in the global sport movements like “sport wars”, “sport Nazism”, “sport terror”, “clean athletes”, “clean sports”, “doping users” etc. It is not unusual for the sport science and practice to accept new terms and definitions, and it is only natural that the unfair politicking in modern sports has brought to being the new ones. The variety of the recent pre- and post-Olympic investigations by multiple international agencies affiliated with global sports has demonstrated that every athlete now has to wait for 8-10 years to be fully confident that his/ her rights for the won medal are fully recognized – knowing that any official can deprive any athlete of the award for any reason. This negative trend in the modern sports may devaluate not only the Olympic medals but also many other values of the global sport movements.
References
- Mirzoev O.M. Analiz sootnosheniya sil na mezhdunarodnoy legkoatleticheskoy arene v olimpiyskom godu (k itogam XIV i XV chempionatov mira po legkoy atletike) [Analysis of balance of forces in international athletics in Olympic year (results of XIV and XV Athletics World Championships]. Teoriya i praktika fiz. kultury, 2016, no. 1, pp. 66-70.
- Mirzoev O.M. Stanovlenie legkoatleticheskogo sporta v noveyshey istorii Rossii [Formation of athletics in the modern history of Russia]. Mat. III mezhdunar. nauchno-praktich. konferentsii «Sport i fizicheskaya kul'tura: Teoreticheskie i prikladnye aspekty nauchnykh znaniy» [Proc. III intern. res.-practical conference "Sport and physical education: theoretical and practical aspects of scientific knowledge"]. Kurgan, KSU publ., 2016, pp. 11-13.
- Mirzoev O.M., Maslakov V.M. Tekhnicheskoe i takticheskoe masterstvo legkoatletov na Olimpiyskikh igrakh: Beg na korotkie distantsii. Barierny beg (k itogam XXX Olimpiyskikh igr) [Technical and tactical skills of athletes at the Olympics: Sprint. Hurdling (to the end of the XXX Olympic Games]. Voronezh: Nauchnaya kniga publ., 2012, pp. 3-24.
- Home of World Athletic. International Association of Athletic Federations Available at: http://www.iaaf.org. (Accessed 12-31.08.2016)
- IAAF World Championships. Beijing. Statistics Handbook. Editor Mark Butler, 2015, pp. 1-332.
Corresponding author: prorector@mail.ru
Abstract
The article offers a competitive performance analysis of the national teams that won gold medals at the Olympic Games in Rio; considers, among other things, unofficial team standings determined by the gold, silver and bronze medals won in the events; gives detailed performance ratings for the top three teams at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro; and makes a comparative team success analysis versus that of the top national track and field competitors at the 2012 Olympic Games in London [3]. Subject to a special analysis were the accomplishments of those teams (including the European ones) who have improved their team standings versus their results in the last Olympics.
