Great Things Series: The Olympics

 Welcome to the new series on the Makers Rage podcast, where we explore "Five and a Half Great Things" that have defined the Olympic Games across history. We’ll journey back to 776 BCE, when the Olympic flame was first lit, and the stadion race marked the beginning of an era. Discover how the games evolved, from the introduction of the pentathlon and hoplitodromos to the creation of the Panhellenic games, uniting Greek city-states in friendly competition. We’ll note the impact of the Roman conquest, which saw the games banned in 394 AD, only to be revived over a thousand years later in 1896. Explore the significance of the Olympic creed, the origins of the marathon, and the ongoing discussions around fairness, including the impact of doping and modern controversies. Join us as we uncover how these traditions have shaped not only sports but also cultural and historical identities across the world. 

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Transcript

 The new series, Five and a Half Great Things,  someone gave me a bit of feedback suggesting that lists are always popular, and I didn't want to just do a top ten, which is kind of cliche, everyone does top tens, or even top fives,  so I said,  five and a half great things, the half being one not so great thing,  or perhaps a humorous, disreputable thing. 

associated with a particular topic or person or idea  or place.  In this case, the Olympics, which has just ended.  At the time of recording the closing ceremony was yesterday.  But I already miss it, so I'm going to do five and a half great things about the Olympics.  Although I probably should have done it before it started.

I guess I forgot how much I appreciated them.  So, for me, the very first great thing is, in fact, the very first Olympic Games, traditionally taught to be in 776 BCE. Probably not exactly that year, but certainly sometime in the 8th century BCE. Note, this wasn't when the first Olympic flame was lit.  That wasn't until the Olympics in Amsterdam in 1928. 

But I don't think it's any coincidence that the first Olympics was happening at exactly the time that the Iliad and the Odyssey were supposed to have been written.  When if not the Olympic flame, the flame of civilization was beginning to kindle again, after the long period of darkness that followed the Bronze Age collapse. 

The first Olympics consisted of just a single sporting event that happened to occur at the same time  as a religious ceremony at the city of Olympia to celebrate Zeus. It was just a foot race or a sprint called a stadion, which is around 200 meters, and the first winner was supposedly a cook from the city of Elis called Korybus.

And why a foot race?  Perhaps if you were the fastest man in Greece, you were taught to most closely resemble that great hero who was known by the epithet Fleet footed:  Achilles. And in fact it wasn't until the 14th Olympiad in 724 BC that a second event was added, the Diaulos, which just consisted of two stadions, so adding a bit of endurance to the challenge. 

There was no marathon at this stage of course. The Battle of Marathon wouldn't occur for several hundred years, but there was a race added in 714 BCE that might have resembled it somewhat called the Dolichon, which was a race of 24 stadiums, I suppose. Eventually the Greeks thought to add a bit of variety with all this foot racing, so they added the Hoplitodromos, a race of two stadiums while wearing a helmet and shield.

There was also the emergence of the Pygmachia, the forerunner of boxing,  and indeed this was a boxing match that lasted until knockout or submission.  There were no breaks, no gloves, no corner men, and the boxers wore not gloves but leather straps that readily caused cuts. Soon after an even more popular event was introduced called the Pankration, which resembled a UFC belt but with fewer rules.

You could strangle, choke, kick, break bones. Only no biting and no gouging was allowed. It's interesting to note here the Greek word for contest is agon, which is cognate with the word agony.  It's no wonder the Pankration became the single most popular event at the Olympics.  Well, except perhaps for the chariot race.

Maybe prestigious is a better word than popular.  Although it was popular, but only the wealthy could compete. And  In the sense that only the weldy could afford a bega or quadri  a chariot of two or four horses and send a slave to race them. Of course, whoever owned the horses took the credit. Though they might have had the athleticism of jabed a hut,  eventually other games were added to occur  in between each Olympics.

The Greeks like us being impatient to wait four years. The Isthmian Games in honor of Poseidon.  The Nemean Games, also in honour of Zeus, but at the Temple of Nemea in Argolis. And the Pythian Games, in honour of Apollo, which included artistic events, mainly musical, Apollo being of course the chief of the muses. 

Together these were called the Pan Hellenic Games. And in fact, it was a wrestler called Milo of Croton, who was the first to earn the prestigious title of Periodoniches are the winner of all Pan Hellenic games during the same Olympiad. Such was the glory that was Greece. The games persisted even after the Roman conquest, and indeed the Emperor Nero wanted to be a Periodoniches himself as a charioteer, and despite falling out of the chariot in one of the races, and not even finishing, declared himself winner and Periodoniches for that Olympiad. 

The record was eventually corrected after he was assassinated. Anyway, eventually Christianity came along and spoiled the party, and the Emperor Theodosius I banned it as a pagan practice in 394 AD, after more than a thousand years of uninterrupted Olympiads.  Eventually, the site of Olympia was abandoned, looted, and a temple, and a famous statue of Zeus, carved by Phidias.

And one of the seven wonders of the world, would be destroyed by earthquakes and buried in the surrounding landscape. And all evidence of their existence lost.  Until 1766, when an archaeologist, Richard Chandler,  rediscovered it in Greece, now a colony of the Ottoman Empire.  And after Greek independence, extensive excavations eventually revived an interest in the Olympic Games.

Later in the 19th century, and so it would have a second beginning in 1896. Not as a religious festival, but a secular one,  spearheaded by Pierre de Coubertin, who establishes the IOC in preparation for the inaugural  games in Athens, for which the Panathenaic Stadium, which dates back to the 4th century BCE, was completely renovated. 

and I suppose remembering that the Greek word for contest His Agon writes in the Olympic Creed, quote,  The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part. Just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle.  The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well. 

Great thing about the Olympics, number two,  the Olympic Truce, or Echicairia. Before each competition, emissaries were sent out from the city of Olympia. The Greek cities in the whole Greek world are Magna Graecia.  Cities that were scattered across the Mediterranean basin. From the Black Sea and Asia Minor to North Africa, Italy and Southern France.

And these emissaries would announce  the exact date of the next Olympic Games.  And a sacred truce is then announced. Called the Three month Truce of Zeus.  And this was in fact enforced by the Spartans, so maybe why it was never violated. An interesting aside here, the Spartans never competed in the boxing, or Pygmachia.

Because victory was only by submission, if a Spartan boxer was bettered, the shame of submitting was so great, most would rather die. And yet you can see that while the agon, or sporting contest,  isn't a solution to warfare, it sublimates our more violent tendencies. If Clausewitz said, war is politics by other means, then the games could be thought of as war by other means. 

It was always understood that warfare would resume right afterwards though, and the hoplite adromos, or hoplite footrace,  occurring near the end of the ancient games, was a pointer to this. The modern games have never been an occasion to enforce a truce, in fact in the two world wars it was the olympics that were suspended. 

Which is fine for a secular games, but notably something the ancient Olympians would have considered sacrilege.  Number three, the pentathlon.  And in fact, I'm gonna throw in the modern heptathlon and decathlon in here. Because although decathletes  and heptathletes and triathletes aren't as celebrated in the modern games,  the ancients considered these all round athletes to be the greatest.

Because though inferior to specialised athletes in individual events,  they were considered superior in overall development.  The ancient pentathlon consisted of five events, running or stadion of course, jumping, discus, javelin and wrestling, and the Greeks being obsessed with balance and proportion in body or harmonia and mind or temperament, sophrosyne.

It's no wonder the Pentathletes were the ones who were chosen as models for sculpture, especially when chiseling the bodies of the gods. The Discus Thrower by Myron, the Spear Bearer by Polykleitos, and the Artemisian Bronze depicting Zeus throwing a thunderbolt  all may have been modelled on famed Pentathletes. 

The fourth great thing,  Marathon,  meaning the race, the battle,  and the little town in Greece. After which both are named. Inflating the ancient accounts of Herodotus, Lucian, and Plutarch, among others, the story goes that in 490 BC, during the forced Persian invasion of Greece, the Athenians won a famed victory near the bay of Marathon.

Despite being vastly outnumbered, and they sent their greatest runner, Pheidippides, to run the 25 miles back to Athens. Barefoot, and over mountainous terrain, to announce the victory. In Attic Greek, nini kikiman, we are victorious, and then he died of exhaustion.  In fact, according to Herodotus, Pheidippides was sent, not to Athens, twenty five miles away to announce a victory,  but a hundred and forty miles away, to Sparta, before the battle had even begun, to beg them for help. 

But as usual, the Spartans used the fact it was a holy festival on. That's an excuse not to commit.  So the Athenians won a great victory without their aid.  But after the Hoplites won the ground battle, they saw that the Persian triremes were heading to Athens to outflank them. So the whole Athenian army marched the 40 kilometers or 25 miles back to Athens at a savage pace considering they were in full armor, reminds you of the Hoplitodromos. 

and arriving back in the late afternoon. The Persian ships realized they'd failed and turned away, thus completing the Athenian victory. So Pheidippides didn't run 25 miles and die of exhaustion, he ran 140  miles and arrived in Sparta the next day, and apparently was perfectly fine.  But you can see why we've traditionally preferred the legendary version,  as did Michel Braille and Pierre de Coubertin, who wanted to commemorate the event. 

In the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, 25 men entered this first marathon footrace, 21 of them Greek,  and in a little under three hours, the lead runner was in sight of the newly restored Panathenaic Stadium.  And when the crowd there realized it was in fact a Greek, 80, 000 voices said one word repeatedly,  Neni Kekiman.

We are victorious.  That runner was Spiridon Louis. A Greek water carrier who gave Greece in fact their only track and field victory during that Olympics. Uh, funny aside, in 1912 a Japanese runner named Shizo Kanakuri didn't finish the race but stopped by a house looking for a drink and rest  and in fact fell asleep and the next day discreetly returned to Japan without telling anyone. 

He eventually returned in 1967 to finish his marathon in 54 years, eight months, six days, five hours, 32 minutes, and 20.3 seconds. I loved the 0.3  by contrast. In 1960, the Ethiopian SBI Quila  was the first and only marathon runner to emulate the legendary ities by completing the race and in fact, winning it barefoot. 

The fifth and last great thing, the Olive REIT or Kainos.  Not to be confused with the laurel wreath, which was associated with Apollo and was awarded more for academic or artistic accomplishment.  Consider the idea of the poet laureate,  and in Italy, laureato  refers to any student who's graduated.  The olive wreath, awarded to Olympians,  was taken from an olive tree that grew at the city of Olympia,  and its branches were cut with a pair of golden scissors by a pae's amphitiles.

or a boy whose parents were both living,  and these were placed on a golden, ivory table.  From there, the Hellenodike, or the judges of the Olympic Games, would take them, make the reeds, and crown the winners of the games. Note, there was no podium, no gold, silver, or bronze medals. The reeds crowned only the victors, while the losers, according to the poet Pindar,  went back to their home cities.

Quote. back to their mothers with no delight, creeping through narrow alleys.  That said, if you won, you were fettered like a god on return to your home city, where statues were erected in your honor.  More durable, indeed, than the perishable olive wreath with which you were crowned at Olympia.  And it's important to remember there was no tangible afterlife in Greek religion. 

Hades wasn't an enviable place to end up.  So glory was only achievable in this life.  Again, the ancient historian Herodotus recounts a story that's relevant to this peculiar Greek worldview. While interrogating some Arcadians, the Persian emperor Xerxes asked them why only a few hundred Spartans were defending the Pass of Thermopylae. 

And he said, all the other men are participating in the Olympic games. And when he asked what was the prize that would draw men away from defending their country, An olive wreath came the answer. Flabbergasted, one of his generals uttered, Good heavens, Mardonius, what kind of men are these against whom you've brought us to fight?

Men who do not compete for possessions, but for virtue.  For Coubertin, in his modern Olympic creed, victory wasn't everything. Quote, the essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well.  That's all well and good. But the ancient Greeks would have disagreed.  And yet, in the modern Olympics, some of the most memorable moments for us are of athletes not conquering, but fighting well. 

So that's the five great things about the Olympics.  What have I chosen for the half, or not so great thing? I thought about drugs, or cheating. The real reason the Russians aren't allowed to compete. I thought about the fact that there were only men originally allowed to compete.  Or the highly contentious issue of gender in athletics. 

I thought about the several times the Olympics were boycotted,  like the 1980 Moscow Olympics, boycotted by America and others because of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, and then in a tit for tat, when the USSR boycotted the following Olympics in L. A.  Humorously, in 1988,  North Korea and some of its rinky dink allies boycotted the Seoul Olympics in South Korea  because the North weren't allowed to co host. 

But I've decided to end on a humorous note, by listing some of the weirder, crazy events that were once  part of the Olympics. Of course I've already mentioned a few in the ancient games,  like the hoplita dromos, or a race in full armor, or the chariot race, which I think they should bring back, although members of PETA might protest at horses being whipped, or the pankration, for which there was only two rules, no biting and no gouging.

And indeed there was one winner, Arrakion, who died while being choked, but because his opponent was in the process of submitting, he was declared a winner posthumously.  For the modern Olympics, in the 1900 games in Paris, there was a hot air balloon race, covering 768 miles from Paris to Poland,  which was then part of the Russian Empire. 

The winner, Henri de Laval, on landing was arrested by the Russian police.  Another event at the same Olympics was live pigeon shooting, another one to rankle the PETA warriors. The winner was a Belgian named Leon de Lunne, who shot 21 pigeons.  Altogether, in fact, 300 pigeons were killed apparently in that Olympics.

But like hot air balloon racing, live pigeon shooting only appeared at the Olympics once. At the 1908 Games in London, tug of war was introduced as an event, and this appeared at five Olympic Games before being retired. But there is a significant lobby to bring it back, so who knows what the future holds. 

Also in 1908, pistol dueling was an event, in which competitors shot at each other with wax bullets.  In the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm,  painting was introduced as a competition. As well as other events like sculpture, music, architecture, and literature. This is probably a nod to one of the Panhellenic Games,  the Pythian Games, in honour of Apollo.

Where there were contests in the arts, and a laurel reed was awarded instead of the olive.  Some people competed in both athletic and arts events,  like the American Walter Wynans, who won gold in shooting and in sculpture.  Hungarian Alfred Ahos won two gold medals in swimming in 1896, and a silver in architecture at the Paris Olympics in 1924. 

Suspiciously. The founder of the IOC and champion of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin himself  won a gold medal for literature at the 1912 Summer Olympics for his poem, Ode to Sport, under a pseudonym based on the names of villages close to his wife's place of birth. To deflect suspicion, no doubt,  I've absolutely no intention of reading it. 

So I hope you didn't mind this new Five and a Half Great Things format,  which I'll likely continue in the near future.  I'll have to think about what topic to choose next though. There's a lot of potential. Five and a Half Great Things about certain countries,  certain religions, oh there's a controversial one,  certain people, historical, contemporary. 

TV shows and so on. But next month I'll be continuing with the muses series.  This time, Urania Muse of Astronomy, because I've already recorded it.  So  please join me for that one.