This course had a distance of approximately 25 miles.Īfter those first games, marathons hovered around the 25-mile mark, and no strict standard was set. When the marathon made its debut in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, runners followed the legendary ancient route of a messenger who is said to have run from Marathon to Athens to report that the Greeks had defeated an invading army of Persians. What accounts for this particular distance? Why the need for decimal points and such specificity?Īpparently, the English royal family is to be credited with this (or blamed for it, if one is a runner suffering through those last 385 yards). What is the longest race in the Olympics?.Marathon rules, distance and course at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics.The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) set this standard distance in May 1921, after years of having it bumping around between 24 to 26 miles. That’s 42.195 kilometers for metric-system users. The distance for an official marathon, which avid runners might point out, is actually 26.2 miles or to be absolutely exact, 26 miles and 385 yards. This is a perfectly acceptable answer, and more mathematically accurate than another common answer, which is, “too long”. ![]() ![]() If a non-runner with a rudimentary knowledge of sports were to be asked how long a marathon is, the answer might be “ 26 miles” or “42 kilometers”, depending on where they were in the world and which unit of distance they used.
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