Theme 2 Olympic History

Introduction

“The story of ancient athletics is the story of Greek athletics.The Greeks,as far as we know,were the only truly athletic nation of antiquity.To them,we owe the word athlete and the ideal that it expresses.”

Gardiner distinguishes between the love of play,which he considers to be universal,and the love of the athletic competition.

The child plays till he is tired and then leaves off.The competitor in a race goes on after he is tired,goes on to the point of absolute exhaustion,he even trains himself painfully in order to be capable of greater and more prolonged effort and of exhausting himself more completely.Why does he do this?Why does he take pleasure in what he is naturally painful?”

He identifies four main ideas in ancient Greek athletics:effort（derived from the same root as the word for athlete）,contest of competition,excellence and honor.

“The real prize is the honor of victory.The motive that turns his effort into joy is the desire to put the test his physical powers,the desire to excel.It is not every people any more than every individual that feels this joy in the contest,in the effort.”

The questions are:how did this originate and what can it means for us today?

There was a prehistoric Iron Age settlement at Olympia in the twelfth century BC after the Doric invasion from the north,and remains suggest a particular role for the strategically placed hamlet Olympia was at an early date a scared place,since thousands of votive offerings have been found there dating from at least the tenth century.Local disputes interrupted celebrations,which some say included games and contests,until 884 BC,when local rulers King Iphitus of Elis,lawgiver Lycurgus of Sparta and Archon Cleosthenes of Pisa,made a truce the revived festival.The terms of this sacred truce were engraved on a bronze disk which still existed in the time of Pausanias,who describes it to us from the second century AD,but we have no record of any games that might have taken place.

The ancient Olympic Games began at Olympia in 776 BC and were held every four years until banned by the Emperor Theodosius I in 394 AD.The last Games, the 293rd,were in 393 AD,and so they had been held continuously for 1168 years. This astonishing record in and of itself demands the attention of students of history.Apart from the rituals of some of the major world religions,what other human institution has lasted as long?（gives a detailed account of the cultural,customary and legal background to the celebration of the Games）.

In 776 BC only the stade race 192 meters was run or at least was recorded officially）,and events were added as the years went on.It is still possible to place one feet in the marble starting-blocks at one end of the excavated stadium at Olympia,and to run the full stade.Dress provides a detailed account of the probable course of events over a five-day Games in the fifth century BC,including events such as chariot racing,the pentathlon（discus,long jump,javelin,running,wrestling）,the stade,the diaulos（two stades）,the dolichos（24 stades or 4600 meters,wrestling,boxing,the pankration（a combination of wrestling and boxing）and the hoplite race（in armour）.In addition,there would be religious activities,including ritual sacrifice of animals.Dress mentions 100 bulls to be roasted,and other sources marvel at the size of the mound of ashes thereby created over the years.Attendances in this rural location were said to have reached 40000.

The origins of the Games are shrouded in myth and historical construal.But let us simply record Gardiner's conclusions:

“The Olympic festival was a festival of lustration marking the beginning and afterwards the middle point of a great year of eight years.It was a festival of Zeus, the predominant god of the district...His festival was a cessation from arms... Games were held at which only free-born warriors of the tribes might compete. The season of the festival was early autumn,a season of rest from agricultural work...”

And let us absorb the descriptions of Paleologos:

Olympia's glory was extraordinary.Large crowds used to come every four years to worship at the sanctuaries,admire the great works of art,listen to historians,poets and rhapsodists and watch the statuesque men,well-built boys and wingfooted horses competing in fascinating contests.For many centuries,Olympia had become a panhellenic center...In Olympia the great Themistocles was acclaimed,Herodotus read a part of his history.Plato spoke and Demosthenes,Ippias, Prodicus,Anaximenes,Pindar,Simonides,Thucydides,Polus,Gorgias,Anaxagoras, Diogenes the cynic,Lucian came as spectators.”

These Panhellenic festivals were much more than athletic meetings,since Olympia became the meeting-place of the whole Greek world.At an early date various states,many of them from overseas colonies,sought to secure themselves a permanent standing at the sanctuary by dedicating little temples or treasuries.Thus the site became immensely richer than could have been produced or sustained from local resource alone.

Pindar:

Pindar is one of our richest sources for understanding the qualities of Olympic（and other）Games.His epincian odes,which commemorate the success of a winner in the Games or other athletic meetings,are his only works to have survived almost intact,although the fragments show that he wrote much besides.His career as a writer of victory odes spans at least 52 years.

“What Pindar catches is the joy beyond ordinary emotions as it transcends and transforms them.It can be found in athletic success,convivial,relaxation,song and music,friendship and love,in many natural sights and sounds,in prayer and hymns. He is a religious poet...the poet's task is to catch and keep the fleeting divine moment and to reveal to men what really matters in their busy bustling lives.”

The fact that such an eminent national poet worked to so many athletics commissions is evidence of the supreme importance is athletic success and frame to the Greeks.

However,it was also noticed that moral and political benefits were to be had,In Lucian's dialogue between Solon and Anarcharsis.Solon says:

“We compel them to train and tire their bodies not only for the sake the games and of winning prizes,because very few of them achieve such high performance so as to obtain them,but because we expect than much greater good will ensue for the city-state and for themselves.”

Those few victors were shown as examples worth following.So that young men were encouraged to exercise their bodies.Later,formal intellectual education also became a part of the compulsory education of a young man,as the gymnasium was infiltrated by academics.Aristotle still maintained that:

“The Legislator's first and foremost task is to see to it that the city's men grow strong and to choose the best means to enable them to lead an excellent life.”And:

“Right from the start the legislator must see to it that the bodies of young men become excellent.”

However,whilst the Ancient Olympic Games lasted for twelve centuries,they were forgotten for over thirteen centuries,as earthquake,flood and theft destroyed and buried the site,and it was not until recently that excavations revealed what remains we can see today.

Olympics-17～19 Century Revivals

Given the lose to memory of the Greek legacy,the Middle Ages in Europe saw very different forms of physical competition that those of Olympia,such as chivalric tournaments and many forms of folk games and contests.But a series of attempts at recreating the Olympic Games were initiated from the beginning of the 17th century.Liponski,building on the work of Redmond,lists 17 attempts at re-establishing the Olympic Games before 1896.

Olympics-17～19 Century Chronology

1604 revival of the Olympic Games by Robert Dover in the Cotswold Hills.It lasted intermittently until 1857,re-established in 1952.

1819 highland Games of Celtic origin revived in St.Fillans,Scotland and Scottish emigration to Australia,Canada,New Zealand,South Africa and the USA.

1839 an Olympic Games in Sweden.

1844 raveling Olympic Games organized in Germany by one Gaertner,visited also western section of Poland them occupied by Prussia.

1849 Olympic Games organized by William Penny Brookes in Much Wenlock, Shropshire,England.

1853 Franconi Hippodrome in New York,USA,featured any of the most attractive games of ancient Greece and Rome.

1859 Evangelios Zappas attempts to revive the Olympic Games in Athens.

1862 First Olympic Festival in Liverpool,England,organized by the Athletics Club of Liverpool.

1863 Second Olympic Festival in Liverpool.

1864 Third Olympic Festival in Liverpool.

1866 First Olympic Festival organized by the Athletic Society of Great Britain（in Llandudno,Walse）.

1867 Second Olympic Festival organized by the Athletic Society of Great Britain（in Liverpool,England）.

1870 Second attempt to revive the Olympic Games in Greece（Athens）.

1873 Local Olympic Games organized in the Polish town of Grodzisk Wielkopolski（then under German occupation）.

1875 Third Olympic Games at Athens.

1888 Fourth Olympic Games at Athens.

1892 An Olympiad proposed by J Astley Cooper,unsuccessful but initiated the idea of the British Empire Games,later called the Commonwealth Games.

These many and varied attempts at reviving the idea of ancient Olympic compe tition are evidence also of a revival of interest in the underlying values and virtues of organized sport.Despite the fact that most of these attempts were unsuccessful in the long run,they nevertheless provided a kind of a link between the ancient and the modern forms of sports,and between the ideas of the ancients and of such revivers as de Coubertin.

Pierre De Coubertin

The French aristocrat de Coubertin,inspired by the example of the role of sport in the English public school,motivated by his friendship with Penny Brookes and with Greek revivalists such as Vikelas,sought to reinstate the Games as an international multi-sport festival.A Congress with held at the Sorbonne in Paris in June 1894,with 79 delegates from 14 countries and 49 athletes societies resolving to do so.De Coubertin agreed with Vikelas that a symbolic link with the past would be created by holding the first modern Games in Athens,and they were organized in April 1896.This clip from the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm is the first recorded evidence that shows some of the events included in the program.

The following official documents give you an idea about the views of William Penny Brooks and the British involvement with the Olympic Games.

De Coubertin found further inspiration in the discoveries of the German archaeologist Curtius,who had uncovered the ancient stadium in Olympia（orama.com/athens1896/index.html）.

And shortly after the 1894 Congress,he visited Olympia.In his essay Olympia written many years later,de Coubertin says:

“I therefore invite you...to come and sit on the wooded slopes of Mount Kronion at the hour when beyond the Alpheus the rising sun begins to touch the swelling hills with gold and to lighten the green meadows at their feet...

One a morning in November 1894,I became aware in this sacred place of the enormity of the task which I had undertaken in proclaiming five months earlier the restoration of the Olympic Games after an interruption of fifteen hundred years...

From this lovely pine forest which I climbs Mount Kronion...it is possible to recreate in imagination the long avenues of plane trees along which there once came the athletes and pilgrims,the embassies and the commerce,all the traffic and all the ambition...

Altis-the scared precinct-immediately reveals itself as a religious focus,the centre of a cult.Among this people and above all at this time it is difficult to imagine a religion not based upon a positive philosophical conception.

Let us therefore look for this basis.And if there really was a religion of athletics...let us find out why it is in Greece that it took shape,and whether the Greek ideal...is still suited to the rest of humanity.”