The most Olympic Records
211 records on Sport Group tracks at the Olympic Games
Sport Group, as the owner of the original synthetic track surfaces, Tartan and Rekortan, have a long and record-breaking history with the Olympic Games.
Overall, our tracks have been used at 7 Olympic Games.
Our heritage brand Tartan, which is still available in Europe, was chosen for the Mexico City (1968), Montreal (1976) and Moscow Games (1980).
Our global track brand Rekortan was used at for 4 Olympic Games, Munich (1972), Los Angeles (1984), Seoul (1988) and the Sydney 2000 warm up track.
“These tracks, which combine the best of 50 years of German and USA track engineering, help athletes deliver breakthrough performances.”
Moscow Olympics. Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
The most Olympic Records
These tracks, which combine the best of 50 years of German and USA track engineering, help athletes deliver breakthrough performances. In total 211 Olympic Records have been broken on Rekortan and Tartan tracks over the course of the 6 Games where we provided the competition track. By comparison, the record haul on other tracks stands at just 93 from the 8 Games from Barcelona to Tokyo.
Out of the 211 Olympic records on our tracks, 56 were also world records. This compares to only 19 world records in the last 8 Games.
Mexico 1968: 49 Olympic Records
The legendary 1968 Games in Mexico marked the first Olympics to move from a cinder to a Tartan synthetic track. It was the sport’s fastest track ever, and held at altitude, the Mexico Games gave the jumpers and throwers a natural advantage as well as the athletes who had trained at altitude, which was a relatively new phenomenon.
It was in Mexico that Bob Beamon jumped an incredible 8.90m. In 13 editions of the Olympic Games nobody has jumped further! This is the longest-standing Olympic Record in Track & Field.
Montreal Olympics. Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Munich Olympics. Credit: Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo
Munich to LA: 113 Olympic Records
Munich 1972 continued Track and Fields’ explosion in performance with 43 Olympic records. Amongst so many great athletes perhaps Lasse Virén was the most remarkable.
The following three Olympics were diminished by boycotts which reduced their record count to Montreal (25 records), Moscow (23 records) and LA (22 records). However, these are still more records than the Games have featured since Sydney.
Seoul 1988: 49 Olympic Records
The 1988 Seoul Olympics were a remarkable moment in Track history. The Games saw more Track and Field Olympic Records fall than at any of the Olympic editions that followed it, and more Olympic records than the last 4 Olympics combined.
Excluding Field and combined events, 23 records were smashed in the Track events alone which is higher than the records broken for all Track and Field at any subsequent Games.
Seoul Olympics. Credit: Richard Ellis / Alamy Stock Photo
LA Olympics
Seoul marked the tipping point in Track’s transformation from cinder to synthetic.
20 years after the first synthetic track in Mexico, Seoul was the coming-of-age for the ‘synthetic track natives’, a generation of athletes who had spent their careers training on high-performance tracks. With Tartan and Rekortan tracks at their feet, they were able to take the sport to new levels.
Sport Group is proud to have been involved in transforming the sport, and with the most certified tracks and the biggest global track installation network, we are proud to still be helping Track grow and develop.
* Sources: Event per event analysis according to the IOC results database and Olympedia
* For the purposes of this research, we are not counting marks that have equalled Olympic Records ("EOR"), choosing to include in the research only Olympic records that have surpassed the previous mark ("OR").