The South Pacific Athletics Championships were an international athletics competition between island nations of the South Pacific Ocean. The championships was contested on three occasions: it was first held in 1976, had its second edition in 1978, then its final edition in 1984. Ten nations won medals at the competition during its lifetime.[1] The competition emerged as a single-sport championship following in the footsteps of the region's multi-sport event established in 1963: the South Pacific Games.[2] The athletics competition declined with the emergence of the South Pacific Mini Games in 1981, which was a smaller-scale event with athletics as its core sport.[3]
The competition programme featured a total of 38 individual championship athletics events, 22 for men and 16 for women. For each of the sexes, there were six track running events, two obstacle events, three jumps, two throws, and one combined track and field event. The women's programme featured fewer events than the men's: women did not compete in distance events longer than 3000 m, and only men contested the steeplechase, pole vault, triple jump, and hammer throw. Men and women had a pentathlon in the first two editions, with this being replaced by a men's octathlon and women's heptathlon at the final edition. A women's 400 m hurdles was contested once only in 1984, as this event gained international acceptance during this period.[1]
