– why aren’t all middle/long distance athletics track events in multiples of 400? Why the 1500 metres and not 1600 metres so that the race is an exact number of laps.

Question

– why aren’t all middle/long distance athletics track events in multiples of 400? Why the 1500 metres and not 1600 metres so that the race is an exact number of laps.

In: 61

Answer 1

Best explanation I could find was that the French, who had a lot to do with establishing the modern Olympics, actually used to have tracks that were 500 meters (1800’s), so it was three laps for them.

Also 1,500 meters is 1.5 kilometers, which is a nice fractional metric number, where 1.6k looks odd in metrics.