Track & Field (Athletics)

Athletics Poll

Here is the result of a poll conducted on this site a little while back. Out of the 240 voters, there was a clear winner.

choices	number of votes	percentage
100m (from 9.78 to 9.5 sec)	70	29
marathon (2:04.55 to 2 hrs)	152	63
neither, they will not ever reach those levels	18	8
Total votes	240

Here is a selection of the comments that were made about this poll.

A new sprinter could enter the sports world with an amazing time but I cant see 5 minutes being knocked off the marathon time.
I feel the marathon will get broken before the 100m because the 100m has been getting a lot of scrutiny i.e. athletes testing positive to banned substances
I really believe it will be the marathon as training can be done on the aerobic energy system to gradually obtain this goal which is a very hard goal indeed but seems of the two to be more achievable. As for the ballistic speed of the 100m sprinter is so great I feel that a whole new technique of the initial push off would have to be found before there is such a dramatic change of time taken to finish the 100m but I guess sometime in the future this will be found and no doubt this will be achieved at some point.
There is much more scope in a marathon to shave off a second or two whereas the 100m has reached about as fast as it can get.