 The establishment of the modern Olympic Games at the end of the 19th century marked a new high for track and field . The Olympic athletics programme , comprising track and field events plus a marathon race , contained many of the foremost sporting competitions of the 1896 Summer Olympics . The Olympics also consolidated the use of metric measurements in international track and field events , both for race distances and for measuring jumps and throws . The Olympic athletics programme greatly expanded over the next decades , and track and field contests remained among the Games ' most prominent . The Olympics was the elite competition for track and field , and only amateur <unk> could compete . Track and field continued to be a largely amateur sport , as this rule was strictly enforced : Jim Thorpe was stripped of his track and field medals from the 1912 Olympics after it was revealed that he had played baseball professionally . 
