🏃Rules Athletics

Athletics (track and field) covers running races, jumps, throws and combined events. This sheet focuses on timed track events: sprints, middle and long distance, hurdles and relays. The objective is simple: cover a fixed distance as fast as possible. The winner is the athlete (or relay team) who crosses the finish line first, with the timer separating performances down to the hundredth, or even the thousandth, of a second.

Cover the set distance as fast as possible and cross the finish line ahead of your rivals. In lane races (sprints), you must also stay within your lane from start to finish. In relays, the team must pass the baton hand to hand inside the regulation takeover zone.

• •Each runner stays in their assigned lane in sprints (100 m to 400 m) and must not impede rivals.
• •The start is given by the starting pistol; any starting motion before the signal is a false start.
• •In all races, it is the torso (not the head, arms or legs) that determines crossing of the finish line.
• •In hurdle races the athlete must go over each hurdle; knocking one down is not penalised in itself, but going around or under it is.
• •In relays the baton must be passed inside the takeover zone; a takeover outside the zone causes disqualification, and a dropped baton must be recovered by the runner who dropped it.
• •The final ranking depends on time: the lowest time wins.

In track events, the 'score' is the recorded time. Fully automatic electronic timing starts on the pistol shot and stops when the torso crosses the line, accurate to a hundredth of a second (thousandth to separate ties). The lowest time wins. In team or points competitions (meetings, inter-club championships), each placing earns points on a scale and the team with the highest total wins; but the individual event itself is ranked by time.

Events are usually run in qualifying heats, then semi-finals and a final depending on the number of entrants. In sprints and the 800 m, athletes run in assigned lanes; in middle and long distance (from the 800 m after the first bend, or directly from 1500 m upward), athletes group together. An athletics meeting combines several track and field events over a single day or weekend.

The winner is the first athlete whose torso crosses the finish line, that is the one with the lowest time. In the event of a perfect thousandth-of-a-second tie for qualification, the athletes involved are separated or both advanced according to the competition rules. In relays, it is the team whose final runner crosses the line first.