How are marathon numbers decided (And why do they always seem to be in the thousands?)

Question

Watching an old Olympic marathon and I'm wondering... How are the marathon athlete numbers decided?

In other disciplines, usually the favorite has 1, then the runner up 2, etc.

But in the Olympic marathon, numbers are in the thousands even if there are 100 runners, and they are not even sequential (there's #1395, then #2162, etc.)

So is there any logic in the marathon number attribution? Or is it just a random number picked between 1000 and 9999?

Glorfindel · Accepted Answer

If I'm not mistaken, the athlete numbers are one large pool for all athletic events, including the track and field ones. Athletes are ordered, first by gender (women first, men last), then by country, then by last name. Numbering started at 300 (Kamia Yousufi, the only female athlete from Afghanistan); I'm not sure why that number was chosen.
You can even see some part of this schema in the very first frame of the video you linked to:

BRA 1226
KOR 2352
LIE 2423
MAR 2451
MAW 2480

I'm not aware of a full list of athletes with bib numbers, but our newly elected moderator Joe found a site with the results per event.

How are marathon numbers decided (And why do they always seem to be in the thousands?)

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