OUAC - Heritage v2
Plaque name: Oxford University Athletics Club
Location: OUAC Track, Iffley Road Sports Centre, Iffley Road, Oxford, OX4 1EQ, UK.
Plaque awarded: 06/05/2024
Reason: Plaque Category – Competition
The Oxford University Athletics Club (OUAC) was founded in 1860 and is one of the, if not the, oldest athletics clubs in the world.
Yet the decades of the 1850s and 1860s when organised athletics competitions began to be developed remain shrouded in myth and conjecture.
What is unarguable is that the OUAC was among a small group of fledgling sports organisations in the UK and the USA which pioneered the development of modern-day athletics.
The club helped lay the organisational foundations, the formats, and rules of many of the athletics disciplines upon which today’s international sport of athletics was built.
The OUAC has made and continues to make an immeasurable contribution to the development of a sport which at its heights at the Olympic Games and the World Athletics Championships is watched by billions around the world.
Some aspects like running around a track in a clockwise direction, which continued in Oxford into the 1940s, do not remain today.
Yet others, like the Steeplechase track event, which was invented at Oxford University, continue to thrive.