Where did innovation go?

World Athletics loves the word innovation. Type it into the search box on the World Athletics website and you will find articles going back to 2019. (That is already an improvement: until recently, the search function was in shambles and finding anything on the site was an achievement in itself). Unfortunately, the early articles offer little more than polished journalistic blah-blah. Things become slightly more interesting with World Athletics’ article on its “four-year business strategy”. The article links to a substantial document entitled Pioneering Change (2024-2027), which sets out the organisation’s strategic priorities for the future of Athletics.

It is an interesting document, or rather, a profoundly uninteresting one if you actually care about Athletics. It reads less like a sporting strategy than a marketing brochure. Its central ideas are familiar:

Make events faster-paced and more exciting for millions of people watching in stadiums and at home.

Increase innovation throughout the sport and bring athletes and fans closer together.

Turn athletes into the stars they deserve to be through competitions and social media.

Create more inclusive and accessible ways to enter Athletics as an athlete, coach, referee, volunteer, or administrator.

The problem is that none of this is specific to Athletics. Replace “stadium”, “athlete”, and “coach” with the corresponding words from almost any other field and the same paragraph would still work. This is not a strategy for Athletics. It is a collection of general ambitions expressed in corporate language.

The concrete plan is to “reconfigure the summer season to conclude each season with a global championship” and to launch “a new global championship in non-World Championship years”. The latter is the Ultimate Championship, to be held in September with a truncated and strangely unbalanced programme whose logic escapes me. The most revealing passage appears under the fourth strategic axis:

Discipline reform to see if we can improve the entertainment and excitement value of the sport to help future-proof athletics, with a particular focus on field disciplines, race walks and combined events.

Race walking has already provided us with a useful demonstration of what World Athletics means by innovation. First came the 35 km event. It did not take a high-level coach to see the problem. The 20 km and 35 km distances were too close together. An athlete could prepare for both without having to specialise in either. The new event filled a place on the programme, but it did not create a genuinely distinct discipline. A few years later, the 35 km was abandoned and replaced by the marathon, while the 20 km was replaced by the half-marathon. Innovation, apparently, sometimes means undoing the previous innovation. The mixed relay was at least a worthwhile idea. I find its total distance and its distribution bizarre, with legs of 11.45 km for the first man, 10 km for the first woman, 10 km for the second man, and 10.745 km for the second woman. Yet I find the event interesting. As regular readers know, I am a fan of mixed relays.

The reference to combined events gave me the chills. It probably refers to the proposed introduction of the Gundersen method, in which the final 1500 m would be run as a pursuit race. The athletes would start at intervals determined by the points difference accumulated in the preceding events. This proposal is not innovative. It is simply a way of removing the combined event’s defining feature, namely the competition between different disciplines. The decathlon is not a preliminary contest followed by a final 1500 m race. It is a competition in ten events. Turning the last event into a pursuit race would distort the contest rather than improve it. I have explained in detail why this is a bad idea and have presented the technical arguments in a separate article. I strongly recommend it if the subject interests you.

Jasmine Sawyers winning the 2026 Commonwealth Games' long jump

The document then offers a catalogue of possible innovations.

The first is the mixed 4x100 m relay. I advocated this event in a 2017 article. I had to wait until 2025 to see the relay run in the obvious order: man, woman, man, woman. Before that, World Athletics preferred the woman, woman, man, man arrangement, apparently because its decision-makers could not accept the possibility that a woman and a man could match each other’s speed in successive legs.

Then there is the steeplechase mile. Have you seen one? I have. Once. That was the beginning and the end of my experience with the event. Nobody is talking about it now.

“Improved efficiency of measurements” is another fine example of strategic vagueness. Which measurements? If World Athletics means timing in sprint events, I have already discussed the issue in my Imperative Changes series. If it means wind measurement, that subject too has been discussed in detail. In either case, nothing seems to have emerged from the proposal.

There is also a proposal to use new technology to settle ties in the jumping events. If this means the spectacle staged at the Fribourg “Future of Athletics” competition, where the highest point reached by the vaulter over the bar was measured, then I am relieved that the idea has disappeared into thin air.

I will not spend much time on the proposal to review the weights of the women’s shot and javelin. It is hardly worth discussing. Women already throw the shot beyond 20 m, which is within the broad range of men’s performances. There is no convincing reason to change the weight of the implement. The javelin is a different matter. Reducing its weight to, say, 400 g might produce throws in the region of 80 m, but only if the lighter implement could be thrown with the same efficiency as the current 600 g javelin. That assumption is far from certain. A lighter javelin would also be more vulnerable to crosswinds, making the event less predictable rather than more exciting. If World Athletics really wants to reform the throwing events, it should begin by confronting the records established before effective doping control. We may have to wait a very long time before a woman throws 76 m in the discus again.

The Fribourg “Future of Athletics” Track Lab also featured a women’s 100 m hurdles race with no lower reaction-time limit. This was presented as innovation. It was not. If World Athletics genuinely wants to experiment, it could lower the threshold to 70 ms, a value below what is normally considered a possible human reaction time. At least that would eliminate the absurdity of disqualifying athletes for reacting in 99 ms, as has happened in recent years. And if the organisation really wants to improve the women’s hurdles, it could raise the hurdle height to 91 cm. Keeping it at 84 cm suggests that the people making decisions in Athletics are still influenced by the Victorian idea that women are the weaker sex.

I will not discuss the take-off zone for the horizontal jumps at length. I have written about it several times, and the argument seems obvious to me. In one high-level official competition, unlike the Fribourg slapstick experiment, the number of fouls reportedly fell to 13%, compared with a historical average of 32%. The majority of observers appear to support the change. The exception is the group that matters most to the existing system: athletes and coaches. This is the real obstacle to innovation in modern Athletics. People do not want to surrender an advantage they have worked hard to acquire. Long and triple jumpers have spent years learning to hit the board accurately. They understandably do not want that investment to become irrelevant overnight.

The same logic keeps the women’s decathlon out of the stadium. Heptathletes and their coaches do not want to risk moving from the elite of the discipline to the also-rans once the event includes the discus and pole vault. But this is not a reason to postpone the women’s decathlon. It is a reason to introduce it. Every new event changes the distribution of expertise, and athletes eventually adapt to the demands of the discipline. The current dominance of the heptathlon should not be allowed to determine the future of women’s combined events.

And now we come to the question in the title. Where did innovation go? Nowhere. It never existed as a coherent programme, and it was never intended to. What World Athletics calls innovation is mostly presentation, repackaging, and occasional experimentation. The sport’s fundamental problems remain untouched. The organisation produces strategies, slogans, workshops, laboratories, test events, and press releases. But a genuine innovation would require something more difficult: deciding what Athletics is for, identifying which parts of the sport need changing, and accepting that meaningful change will upset people who benefit from the status quo. That is the part missing from the programme.

Zappas and the Revival of the Olympics (part 3 of "the real story of the Olympics")

Soutsos’ appeal for the revival of the Olympic Games struck a chord in many Greek hearts. Unfortunately, it did not move those who actually had the power to act, except for one man, and what an exception he was.

Evangelis Zappas was born in a village of northern Epirus (a region that today belongs to Albania). As a young man he fought in the Revolution of 1821, and after Greece gained its independence from Ottoman rule, he emigrated to Romania, where he became a highly successful businessman. He amassed a great fortune and, inspired by Soutsos’ campaign for an Olympic revival, decided to finance it. In 1856 he proposed to the Greek government a permanent revival of the ancient Olympic Games, offering King Otto a very substantial sum, but he received no reply. Soutsos, who was aware of Zappas’ initiative, published an article referring to his own earlier efforts—the 1835 memorandum and his 1845 speech—where he had suggested that an exhibition might accompany the Olympic Games, probably a concession to Otto’s government. The article bore a telling title: Evangelis Zappas. Minister Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, who had initially considered Zappas’ proposal preposterous, soon changed tone. He wrote thanking Zappas for his splendid idea but suggested instead the creation of Industrial Olympic Games, focusing on agriculture, craftsmanship, and industry. It is quite clear that Otto’s government wished to redirect Zappas’ generosity toward less athletic purposes. Zappas agreed to fund these Industrial Olympics, but he remained firm in his wish to restore genuine athletic contests. He wanted the ancient Panathenaic Stadium in Athens rebuilt in marble and provided the necessary funds for its restoration. That would not happen during his lifetime, however, and the stadium was still unfinished for the 1896 Games. It reached its all‑marble form—the Kallimarmaro—only around 1900.

The first Zappas Olympiad took place in 1859. Since the Panathenaic Stadium could not yet be used (systematic excavations would not begin until 1869), the events were held in a square in Athens. The King and Queen attended, along with members of the government, the municipal council, and thousands of spectators. Yet the result was a disappointment. The atmosphere was closer to that of a fair than a proper competition, the organization was poor, and the police had no idea how to manage such crowds. One story even tells of a policeman who abandoned his post to take part in a race. The fiasco cast a shadow on athletics and public sport.

It would take more than a decade for another Olympiad to be organized. By then Zappas had died (in 1865), but his cousin Konstantinos, his heir and devoted follower, continued his work. In 1870 the second Zappas Olympiad took place, and this time it was a great success. The freshly excavated Panathenaic Stadium was ready to host the events, giving them both dignity and symbolic weight. Many elements that we now associate with modern Olympic Games appeared for the first time at this event: an opening ceremony, a musical anthem, proper athletic attire, timekeeping, medals and diplomas for the first three athletes, sponsors, and even a closing ceremony. One feature quite foreign to the ancient Games was the presence of women among the spectators.

The success of the second Olympiad encouraged plans for a third, held in 1875. Unfortunately it proved a failure, despite the involvement of Ioannis Fokianos, who played a major role in the birth of physical education in Greece. Two main causes explain this setback. First, the Olympian Committee in charge of Zappas’ inheritance shifted its focus toward industry and the arts. Money was squandered, and the Olympic pavilion that Zappas had imagined became the Zappeion, a building for exhibitions. Second, an anti‑athletic faction complained that in the previous Olympiad athletes from the working class had been allowed to compete—and even to win. They pressed for limiting participation to youth from the “cultured class”. Consequently, only university students were admitted in 1875. A mere twenty‑four athletes competed, the crowd was much smaller, and the royal family did not attend. The press was merciless, and a disheartened Fokianos left Athens for Thessaloniki (still under Turkish rule), where he remained until 1879.

The failure of the third Olympiad gave the Olympian Committee a convenient excuse to postpone the next one. The fourth and last Zappas Olympiad did not take place until 1889. When the Zappeion was inaugurated in 1888, a royal decree ordered that the next Olympiad be held together with a commercial exposition, but the athletic competitions were twice postponed. In the end, Fokianos himself organized them and paid the expenses out of his pocket. The events were not held in the Panathenaic Stadium but in Fokianos’ small gymnasium. On the first day the crowd was so large that the contests could not proceed, so they were postponed again and finally held a few days later, with just thirty athletes taking part (mostly Fokianos’ own students).

That was the end of the Zappas Olympiads. Zappas’ dream of an Olympiad in Greece every four years remained just a dream, seized and rebranded by a French baron who convinced the world that the idea had been his all along. Meanwhile, the vast funds Zappas had set aside for athletics were diverted by the “Olympian Committee” toward projects they deemed of greater importance—though one may well ask, for whom?

Yet Greece was not alone in its attempts to resurrect the Olympic ideal. In the next post, we turn to England—and to the small town of Much Wenlock, where a local doctor’s vision would prove surprisingly influential on the Olympic story to come.

Why do we run anticlockwise?

In writing this title, I realized that it may become unintelligible to future generations. As digital clocks replace analog ones, we may need a better term altogether. Mathematics, of course, does not depend on clocks to define the direction around a circle; what we call anticlockwise is simply the positive direction. 

What spurred this post was an article I came across in which one of the co-authors was K. Nishinari. I have known Nishinari-san for many years. I have visited and lectured in his laboratory at the University of Tokyo, and we even once planned a collaboration (which, unfortunately, never materialized). He describes himself as a “jamologist,” a specialist in “jams” (traffic jams, but not only). I still remember one of his seminars, in which he explained how to avoid jams in inkjet printers. I had to follow the seminar in Japanese, a language I do not speak, yet I managed to understand the topic thanks to Nishinari-san’s excellent presentation.

This time, the question was whether there is a left-right symmetry breaking when we move in crowds. In other words, do we tend to favor clockwise or anticlockwise turns? (Perhaps I should point out to my American readers that what I call anticlockwise is what they would call counterclockwise). The article, based on a Spanish-Japanese collaboration, was published in Nature Communications. The authors found that an anticlockwise bias in roaming pedestrians is a robust and reproducible feature. It is independent of crowd size, boundary effects, laterality traits (handedness, footedness, or eye dominance), and social norms. (Admittedly, the study participants were children and young adults, which raises the question of what would happen in the case of individuals with functional limitations). More importantly, the authors showed that the anticlockwise preference originates in individual locomotor tendencies rather than in collective interactions. (This runs counter to the common belief that group-level behaviours are more than the sum of individual behaviours).

The authors do not offer an explanation for this phenomenon, but they do mention some preliminary studies of blindfolded walking, which resulted in a circular motion in one direction “due to accumulating drift in their subjective straight-ahead, possibly linked to vestibular noise”. I will not delve further into this excellent article from the Spain-Japan collaboration. If you are interested, you can find it here.

Back to the anticlockwise preference. If you are, like myself, a swimmer who has to share a training lane with more than one other swimmer, thereby requiring everyone to adopt a circulation that keeps the dividing line always on the same side of the body, it seems natural that the resulting circular motion should be anticlockwise. I cannot claim that this is a spontaneous choice: it may well be a learned behaviour. Still, I have never seen anyone turn clockwise in a swimming lane.

But let us start at the beginning. As always, we have no technical details concerning ancient Athletics. The Ancient Olympics began with the στάδιον (stadion), a run from one end of the stadium to the other. Soon, the δίαυλος (diaulos) was introduced, in which one had to run to the end of the stadium and back. Unfortunately, nothing is known about how the athletes made their turn. On the other hand, literature does exist concerning ancient chariot and horse races, and there it is clear that in the ancient Hippodrome the races proceeded anticlockwise. (I once read a curious story according to which, during Roman times, chariot races in the Circus Maximus were initially run clockwise and later changed by an edict of Nero, after he was struck by the whip of a charioteer. But I would not attach much credibility to that account).

The ancient Greek tradition did not survive into the revival of modern sport. When athletics re-emerged in the nineteenth century, clockwise running was still common, and Oxford and Cambridge are reported to have practiced it well into the twentieth century (which is hard to reconcile with the fact that the direction became standardized soon after the London Olympics of 1908). At the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, track races were run clockwise; the same was true in Paris in 1900 and St. Louis in 1904. A short video from the 1906 Athens Olympics survives, but it shows only the 110 m hurdles; even so, the layout of the track and the direction of the race suggest that clockwise running was still in place at that time. By then, however, several countries had already adopted the anticlockwise convention, and complaints were being voiced. In London, athletes therefore ran with 'the left hand inside', and some sources even mention an IOC decision in 1913 to formalize anticlockwise running. That attribution is somewhat puzzling, since the International Amateur Athletic Federation had already been founded in 1912 and was the body normally responsible for technical matters. In any case, anticlockwise track running has now been the standard for more than a century, and it is unlikely to change anytime soon. And the article by Nishinari et al. provides a scientific rationale for a convention that may once have seemed purely arbitrary.