With the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing just around the corner, we’re going to be spending some time over the next few days talking about the Olympic hopefuls. In an age of commercial and reality television, I feel like the Olympics have become overlooked in the United States as one of the most profound statements on physical fitness.
History of the Olympics
Legend states that Heracles founded the ancient Olympic Games. According to written record, the first games were held in 776 BCE (though it is commonly accepted that the Games had occurred for many years previous to that date). The Olympics consisted of a single event called the Stade. The Stade was a run of 192 meters (210 yards) and was undertaken naked. The Olympic champion for that year was Coroebus.
For the next 1200 years, the Games occurred every four years. They grew, they added events and they allowed a multitude of people to put aside their differences, their wars and their disputes to compete in purely physical arena where their prowess was demonstrated through endurance, strength and skill. In 393 CE, the games were abolished by Theodosius I, a Christian Roman emperor who felt the Games were a pagan influence.
Modern Era
A French man by the name of Pierre de Coubertin instigated the revival of these games because he was interested in bettering the French people who had been recently battered in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In 1890, he began his pitch to revive the Olympic Games and he said in a statement in 1892:
Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands. That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced into Europe the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally. It inspires me to touch upon another step I now propose and in it I shall ask that the help you have given me hitherto you will extend again, so that together we may attempt to realize [sic], upon a basis suitable to the conditions of our modern life, the splendid and beneficent task of reviving the Olympic Games.
In 1896, the first of what we call the modern Olympics was held in Athens, Greece. The Greek government could not afford to build a stadium for the event so a private Greek architect donated the funds to restore the Panathenaic Stadium. The stadium was originally built in 330 BCE and was the ideal site to host the first modern Olympics.
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