Image: Joe_Focus In the good old days of cartoons, whenever there was a race involved the characters readied themselves beside the starting gun. Invariably, something went wrong with the gun.

The Olympics moved away from using a starter’s pistol to begin races because runners closer to the starter had an advantage by hearing the shot sooner than those further away. Because of their ...

Sprinters in the position farthest from the pistols were getting slower start times, so organizers switched to an electronic tone. When the Olympic runners take to their positions on the track ...

It's a recent Olympic tradition for shooting to fire the metaphorical starting pistol on the medal rush. Yang Qian won the first gold at the Olympics in Tokyo and Ginny Thrasher of the United ...