Olympics: What is repechage and how does it work at Paris 2024?

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games will have a repechage round for all individual track events from 200m to 1500m.

The decision is a change from the standard competition format, and will include hurdles events.

“The repechage rounds will give more exposure to our sport during the peak Olympic period and will be carefully scheduled to ensure that every event on our Olympic programme retains its share of the spotlight”, said World Athletics President Sebastian Coe when the new rounds were announced in July 2022.

What is a repechage?

A repechage is a term from rowing and wrestling that allows athletes who have been knocked out in the early rounds have a second chance at qualifying for matches later on.

How will it work?

In every first round heat, a certain number of athletes will secure their progress by finishing in the automatic qualifying positions, but for those who do not finish, there will be a second chance to reach the semi-finals with a repechage heats.

This new system will replace the former when athletes would go through with the fastest times.

What does it mean?

Ultimately, it means that each of the included events will have four rounds, a first round, a repechage round, semi-finals and the final, whereas previously they had contained three.

Every athlete will therefore run in at least two races at the Olympic Games.

What about the other races?

There will be no repechage for the 100m, which has prelimary heats already before the first one.

There will also be no repechage for events from 3000m and increasing in distance because of the already limited time for recovery between the events.

Athletics at Paris 2024, repechage schedule: