Thirty years have elapsed since Atlanta hosted the centennial Olympic Games but memories of a spectacular nine days of athletics action still linger three decades later.
Two world records and 10 Olympic records were set on Mondo’s Sportflex Super X Competition Track, an updated version of the athletics track first introduced at the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games four years earlier,
At the time, it was the most advanced athletics track in the world and provided fitting stage for the premier athletics event in the world.
The individual highlight of the Atlanta athletics programme was undoubtably Michael Johnson’s stunning 200m victory in a world record 19.32. The American sprinter improved his own mark set on the same track at the US Olympic Trials just over a month earlier by 0.34 seconds, the biggest improvement since records began.
“That track was incredibly fast. The way it was built, it gave back almost everything you put into it,” said Johnson, paying tribute to the Mondo athletics track after his record run.
“When you have that kind of traction and bounce, and you pair it with perfect conditions and peak fitness, records are going to fall.”
Mondo engineers prior to the Games talked in glowing terms about how the Sportflex Super X Competition Track had been engineered for speed and were expecting fast times but Johnson’s feat stunned even them.
However, a myth of has persisted that the Mondo athletics track in Atlanta was purely a surface for speed. Local organisers proudly referring to it as “the fastest athletics track in the world.” Its reputation for that singular facet was enhanced when Canada’s Donovan Bailey reduced the 100m world record to 9.84 on just the second day of the athletics. However, dig a little deeper into the superlatives and the Olympic records for the men’s 10,000m and women’s 5000m were also broken in Atlanta. In the field, the Mondo athletics track also helped generate Olympic records in the men’s high jump and pole vault as well as both the men’s and women’s triple jump.
In the 1990s, sustainability was just starting to become a familiar word but was still a basic concept in the sports arena but Atlanta marked was the first time that a stadium hosting a major global athletics championship was built with the intention of the track being removed afterwards.
With this in mind, Mondo engineers produced a track that was specifically designed to have a ‘second life’ elsewhere.
Just a few weeks after the associated Paralympic Games came to an end in Atlanta in towards the end of August in the summer of 1996, over a period of a month the Mondo Super X Competition Track was carefully salvaged before being transferred to the nearby Clark Atlanta University, where it was reinstalled in their Panther Stadium and remained for many more years.
Nowadays athletics track science and sustainability has moved on considerably from 30 years ago, but the 1996 Olympic Games remains a landmark in Mondo history.
And Mondo’s guiding philosophies about athletics track performance and their products place in the world that were evident in Atlanta remain as strong, if not stronger, today than they were as the 20th century drew to a close.