Olympic Games

Marathon at the Olympics

The marathon was originally conceived as a race for the 1896 Olympics in Athens, commemorating the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield at the site of the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. Legend has it that Pheidippides delivered the momentous message "Niki!" ("victory"), then collapsed and died.
The first ever time that the marathon was raced was the first of two trail runs before the actual Olympic race in Athens. The first trial took place on March 10 (February 27 according to the Julian calendar that was observed in Greece at the time). The cometitors were only Greek runners, and the winner was the nineteen-year old Peloponnesian Charilaos Vasilakos, who a month later would come second to Louis in the Olympic marathon.
It is a tradition for the men's Olympic marathon to be the last event of the athletics calendar, with the finish inside the Olympic stadium.

During the first several modern Olympics, the marathon was always an approximate distance. For the 1908 Olympic Games in London, the British royal family requested that the marathon start at the Windsor Castle so that the royal children could witness its start. As a result, the marathon distance was changed to 26 miles to cover the ground from Windsor Castle to White City Stadium, with 385 yards added on so the race could finish in front of royal family's viewing box.

The distance from the Windsor Castle to the Olympic Stadium was 42,195 meters (or 26 miles and 385 yards). In 1924, this distance became the standardized length of a marathon.

List of Olympic Marathon Winners
For more information about the sport of Athletics, go here.
See also information about athletics at the Commonwealth Games.
Running events were part of the ancient Olympic Games, as was javelin, discus and jumping events as part of the pentathlon.
List of Olympic Sports