Printable Athletics score sheet (free PDF)

Fill the top of the sheet in cold, before the first gun. Team A and Team B carry the two clubs or school sections you are following; for an ordinary training session, leave them blank rather than invent two camps. Then Date and Venue, Referee and Scorekeeper, Competition and Match no. That number is not paperwork: a meet lines up heats of the 100 m that look identical in the same handwriting, and a week later a sheet without one belongs to nothing. Category takes the age group and the level, and the box next to it, the one with no printed label, is where your timing method goes.

Ten numbered rows follow, under Event, Participant and Result. In the Event column the distance alone is not enough: add the round, because a meet runs qualifying heats, then semi-finals, then a final — 100 m heat 2 and 100 m final are two separate rows, never one row corrected twice. Participant takes a single athlete, or the whole squad when four runners share one 4x100 m line. A lane number in front of the name only means something in races run in lanes, the sprints and the 800 m; from 1500 m upward the runners group together and the lane says nothing, so drop it.

Nothing waits at the foot of the grid: no final-score row, nothing to add up, because two times cannot be summed. Read the ranking up the Result column, shortest time to longest. Write the hundredth, the way the track announces it, and go down to the thousandth only to split two athletes who are otherwise inseparable. When there is no time, the box still gets something: DQ, DNF or DNS, with the reason in the margin. Then the four signatures, both captains, the referee and you. Hold them back while a judge's flag still marks an irregularity under review: signing would date a decision nobody has taken.

Your job starts before the race, in the starter's voice: on your marks, set, then the shot for crouch starts. One false start is enough to disqualify the offender, and only combined events may apply a different tolerance; it reaches you as a second shot or a recall, then as the red card the starter raises. None of that gets ticked off at the foot of the page — there is no legend printed down there, and nothing that would belong in one, since no action in athletics is worth points and the red card ends a race rather than counting towards anything.

At the line the torso decides, not the head or the arms, and the photo finish reads the vertical plane. In between, three traps turn a fine time into a void one. The lane, 1.22 m wide, has to be held: leaving it to gain an advantage or impede a rival is a disqualification. Hurdles next — knocking one down is no offence in itself, while going round it, under it, or with a foot outside it is. Then the baton, which changes hands inside the takeover zone, a single 30 m block on the 4x100 m since 2018, and a dropped baton belongs to the runner who dropped it.