Athletics at the 2016 Summer Olympics were held during the last 10 days of the games, from 12 to 21 August 2016, at the Olympic Stadium. The sport of athletics at the 2016 Summer Olympics was made into three distinct sets of events: track and field events, road running events, and racewalking events.
Competition schedule
Track and field events were held at João Havelange Olympic Stadium, while the race walks and marathon start and finish in Pontal Beach in the Recreio dos Bandeirantes neighbourhood and the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí, respectively. Apart from the race walks and marathon, ten track and field events held finals in the morning sessions for the first time since 1988. This change was implemented upon the request of the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee (COJOP Rio 2016) and the Olympic Broadcasting Services to be supported by the International Olympic Committee, ensuring that at least one final was broadcast live for each of the world's 24 time zones.
In the tables below, M stands for morning and A for afternoon.
Qualification
The Olympic qualification criteria were simplified by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) from a two-tiered "A" and "B" standard approach to a single qualification standard. Each National Olympic Committee was entitled to send up to three athletes per event that had reached that standard in the period from 2015 to 11 July 2016. Nations without a qualified athlete could enter one male and one female athlete who had not achieved the standard. Marathon runners had additional ways to qualify in that top 20 World Championship or top 10 IAAF Gold Label race finishers were treated as having achieved the standard.
The relay teams entered were the top eight finishers at the 2015 IAAF World Relays plus the next eight highest ranking teams on the seasonal lists (based on an aggregate of their best two times).
Nations with a strong tradition in athletics which had many qualified athletes available for events typically held selection trials to determine their teams (such as the 2016 United States Olympic Trials), or relied on panel decisions by their national governing bodies to determine which athletes could compete.
Daily summaries
At the opening ceremony two figures from the sport of athletics played a key role: Olympic medallist in the marathon, Vanderlei de Lima, lit the Olympic flame for his home nation, while Kenya's Kipchoge Keino became the first recipient of the Olympic Laurel for his efforts in promoting sport. Unlike most Summer Olympic Games, the athletics stadium in Rio was not the venue for the opening or closing ceremonies – that honour went to Brazil's foremost soccer venue, the Maracanã Stadium.
First three days
On the first day, the first gold medal was won by Almaz Ayana of Ethiopia, who broke a long-standing world record in the women's 10,000 metres by almost fifteen seconds. The race as a whole was historically fast, setting four of the five fastest times ever for the distance and seeing eight national records broken. China's Wang Zhen was the first male winner of the 2016 Olympic athletics, topping the 20 kilometres race walk podium. With her final throw of the event, Michelle Carter won the United States' first ever title in the women's shot put, preventing Valerie Adams from winning a third straight title. The first half of the heptathlon saw two athletes set a world heptathlon best: Belgium's Nafissatou Thiam and Great Britain's Katarina Johnson-Thompson both cleared for the high jump. (Their marks would have been sufficient for the individual high jump gold.)