6.3 — The Olympic Games

An athletic festival that ran for over a thousand years, stopped for fifteen hundred, and was restarted by a French aristocrat who thought it would improve education.

The ancient games

What were the original Olympics actually like?

Held at Olympia in the western Peloponnese from a traditional starting date of 776 BCE, every four years, as a religious festival in honour of Zeus. They ran for about 1,200 years until a Christian emperor suppressed pagan festivals around 393 CE.

The first games had one event: the stadion, a sprint of about 192 metres — the length of the stadium, which is where the word comes from. Events were added over centuries: longer races, wrestling, boxing, the pentathlon, chariot racing, and the pankration, a near-unrestricted combat sport in which only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.

Competitors were male, Greek, and free. They competed naked — gymnos, the root of gymnasium. Married women were barred from attending on penalty of death, though unmarried women could watch and there was a separate festival, the Heraea, for women's foot races.

The Olympic truce, the ekecheiria, suspended conflicts to allow safe travel to the games. It did not stop wars; it protected the participants and the sanctuary.

Winners received an olive wreath and, from their home cities, substantial material rewards — free meals for life, cash, statues, exemption from taxes. The amateur ideal attached to the ancient games by the Victorians is a nineteenth-century invention with no basis in antiquity.

Who restarted them, and why?

Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat and educationalist, whose actual concern was the French education system.

He had studied English public schools, was convinced that organised sport built character and that French schooling neglected the body, and became interested in Olympia after excavations there in the 1870s. He proposed a revived international games in 1892 to indifference, and got agreement at a congress in 1894.

The first modern games were held in Athens in 1896: 241 athletes, all men, from 14 nations. By comparison, recent games involve over 10,000 athletes from over 200 delegations.

Coubertin's views do not survive scrutiny well. He opposed women competing, writing that their role should be to crown the victors, and women's participation grew against rather than because of the founder's wishes. The first women competed in 1900 in tennis and golf; women's athletics arrived in 1928, and the marathon only in 1984.

Symbols and medals

Why gold, silver and bronze?

Because those three metals were already ranked by scarcity and value in European culture, and had been used as a hierarchy in currency and prizes long before sport.

The ordering reflects real economics of the ancient and medieval world. Gold is rare and does not corrode; silver is less rare and tarnishes; copper and its alloy bronze are common and corrode readily. That hierarchy is also why coinage was minted in exactly those three metals in descending value.

It was not standard at first. At the 1896 games the winner received a silver medal and an olive branch, and second place got bronze; there was no gold at all. In 1900 many winners received cups or trophies rather than medals. The gold-silver-bronze sequence was standardised at the 1904 St Louis games and became the model for essentially every competition since.

A gold medal has not been solid gold since 1912. Modern ones are silver — at least 92.5 per cent — with about six grams of gold plating.

What do the rings mean?

Five interlocking rings designed by Coubertin in 1913, representing the five inhabited continents united, on a white background, in 1.6.

No ring corresponds to a specific continent. The six colours including white were chosen because every national flag then in existence contained at least one of them.

The motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius — faster, higher, stronger — suggested by a friend of Coubertin who had used it as his school's motto. In 2021 the word Communiter was added, making it "faster, higher, stronger — together", the first change since 1894.

Why is the marathon 42.195 kilometres?

Because of the British royal family.

The distance commemorates the legend of Pheidippides running from Marathon to Athens with news of victory over the Persians in 490 BCE and dying on arrival. The legend is almost certainly not history — Herodotus, the closest source, describes a runner going from Athens to Sparta, about 240 kilometres, to ask for help, and says nothing about a run to Athens or a death.

The early modern marathons were roughly 40 kilometres, varying by course. At the 1908 London games the route was set from Windsor Castle to the stadium at White City so that the royal children could watch the start from the nursery window, and the finish was placed in front of the royal box. That produced 26 miles and 385 yards.

The distance was fixed permanently in 1921, and the reason it is that particular number is that a course was laid out in 1908 to suit a viewing arrangement.

The politics

Why have the Olympics been boycotted?

Because a global event with 200 governments attending is a political instrument whether anyone intends it or not.

1936, Berlin: held under the Nazi government, used explicitly as propaganda, with a boycott debated and rejected in several countries. Jesse Owens won four gold medals, and the widely repeated story that Hitler refused to shake his hand is a simplification — Hitler had stopped congratulating any athletes personally after the first day at the IOC's insistence. Owens himself noted that he was not permitted to use the front entrance of hotels at home.

1968, Mexico City: Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the podium during the American anthem. Both were expelled from the games and faced years of hostility at home. The Australian silver medallist Peter Norman wore a human rights badge in support and was left off subsequent Australian teams.

1972, Munich: eleven Israeli team members were killed after a hostage-taking by a Palestinian group. The games were suspended for a day and then continued, a decision argued about ever since.

1976, 1980, 1984: three consecutive boycotts. African nations withdrew in 1976 over New Zealand's rugby contact with apartheid South Africa; the United States and 65 others withdrew in 1980 over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the Soviet bloc withdrew in 1984 in response.

South Africa was excluded from 1964 to 1992 over apartheid.

Why does hosting the Olympics usually lose money?

Because the costs are certain and the benefits are speculative, and the bidding process systematically encourages underestimation.

Academic study of every games since 1960 has found that cost overruns are essentially universal, averaging well over 100 per cent, and that they are the largest and most consistent overruns of any category of megaproject. Montreal 1976 took the city thirty years to pay off. Athens 2004 contributed to Greece's fiscal crisis. Sochi 2014 is generally estimated above $50 billion.

The structural reason is that a city bids by promising, and the promise is made by politicians who will not be in office when the bill arrives. There is no competitive pressure to be realistic, because the least realistic bid tends to win.

Los Angeles 1984 is the exception usually cited: it used almost entirely existing venues, was the only serious bidder after Montreal frightened everyone off, negotiated hard on television rights, and turned a surplus.

The response has been a decline in cities willing to bid — several referendums have rejected bids outright — and an IOC reform agenda pushing reuse of existing venues and shared hosting.

What is doping and why is it so hard to stop?

The use of substances or methods to improve performance beyond what training alone gives, and it is hard to stop because detection always lags creation.

The turning point was 1988, when Ben Johnson won the 100 metres in a world record and tested positive within days. Of the eight finalists in that race, most were subsequently implicated in doping at some point in their careers.

The World Anti-Doping Agency was created in 1999 with a common code and a prohibited list. Its main tools now are the biological passport, which tracks an athlete's own blood and hormone values over time and flags changes that training cannot explain, and long-term storage of samples so that they can be retested when new methods appear. Medals have been reallocated up to a decade after the event.

The Russian state doping programme, exposed from 2015, was on a different scale: a system in which the national anti-doping laboratory swapped tainted samples for clean ones through a hole in a wall during the Sochi games, with the involvement of the security services. Russia has competed under neutral designations since.

India at the Olympics

What is India's Olympic record?

Modest relative to population and improving. The men's field hockey team dominated the mid-twentieth century, winning eight gold medals, including six in a row from 1928 to 1956 — a period when the sport was played on grass, which suited Indian technique, and before the switch to artificial turf in 1976 changed the game.

In individual events, Abhinav Bindra's 10 m air rifle gold in 2008 was India's first individual Olympic gold. Norman Pritchard won two silvers in 1900 in athletics, though whether he was competing for India or Britain is disputed by the record-keepers themselves.

Neeraj Chopra's javelin gold in 2021 was India's first in athletics, and its largest single-event breakthrough. India's best overall medal haul has been in the range of six or seven medals at a single games.

The explanations offered are the usual ones and each is partly true: a sports system historically funded thinly and administered through federations with more politics than talent identification, an education system that treats sport as a distraction, and a single sport absorbing most of the country's attention and money. The counter-evidence is that where targeted funding and coaching have been applied — shooting, badminton, wrestling, boxing, javelin — results followed within a decade.

The oddities

What events used to be in the Olympics?

Art competitions, from 1912 to 1948, with medals awarded in architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture, for works inspired by sport. Coubertin himself won a gold medal for a poem in 1912, under a pseudonym. They were dropped because the participants were professionals, which conflicted with the amateur rules.

Tug of war was an Olympic sport from 1900 to 1920. Live pigeon shooting appeared in 1900, and around 300 birds were killed, which is the only time animals were deliberately killed at the games.

Other departed events: solo synchronised swimming, club swinging, the plunge for distance (a dive followed by floating motionless as far as possible), rope climbing, and the standing long jump.

What is the difference between the Olympics and the Paralympics?

The Paralympic Games are a separate event for athletes with disabilities, held immediately after the Olympics in the same city and venues.

They began as an archery competition organised in 1948 by Ludwig Guttmann, a neurologist who had fled Nazi Germany, for wounded British veterans with spinal injuries — held on the opening day of the London Olympics, deliberately. His argument was that sport was a rehabilitation tool rather than a diversion, at a time when a spinal injury was treated as a terminal condition.

The name comes from para, meaning alongside, not from paralysis. Athletes compete in classification categories designed to group comparable levels of impairment, and classification is where most of the sport's disputes occur.

What comes next

The next page covers the sports measured against a clock or a tape rather than against an opponent — athletics, swimming and tennis — and why records in some of them have essentially stopped falling.