started, there was at the beginning no stadium building as such, but an open, level stretch of ground where a line was drawn in the sand across the place where the foot race was to start, giving rise to our term ‘starting from scratch’.11 Later, about 350 BC, a splendid new stadium building at Olympia was constructed for foot races, and the length of the track, made of clay and lightly covered with sand, was 600 Olympic feet (192.27 meters); this stadium had at each end a stone sill indicating the