Athletics (sport) - Sports

Sports

See also: List of athletics events

The International Association of Athletics Federations, the sport's governing body, defines athletics in five disciplines: track and field, road running, race walking, cross country running, and mountain running. All forms of athletics are individual sports with the exception of relay races. However, athletes' performances are often tallied together by country at international championships, and in the case of cross country the finishing times of the top athletes from each team or country are combined to declare a team victor.

Read more about this topic:  Athletics (sport)

Famous quotes containing the word sports:

    “I looked so much like a guy you couldn’t tell if I was a boy or a girl. I had no hair, I wore guys’ clothes, I walked like a guy ... [ellipsis in source] I didn’t do anything right except sports. I was a social dropout, but sports was a way I could be acceptable to other kids and to my family.”
    —Karen Logan (b. 1949)

    “There be some sports are painful, and their labor
    Delight in them sets off. Some kinds of baseness
    Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
    Point to rich ends.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
    —Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)