Olympics......................

This information about the Olympics is from Knowledge News...I've always enjoyed the games, but with Papa's medical situation, I haven't been able to keep up with them this time.  When I was a little girl, my Godfather, Jay Honig, was an Olympic official in Track and Field.  Sometimes, he would take me to qualifying events in the Los Angeles area.  When he attended the Olympic games, he'd send me postcards from all over the world.  I am ashamed to say that I don't have a single one anymore.  Probably, they didn't mean much to me at the time, and my mother was not the type to preserve such important pieces of history for me.  She was probably too busy with 5 little ones to think about something like boxing up postcards...........

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Behold! The Statue of Zeus at Olympia,
one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Cue the Olympic trumpets. The games are back--and this time, they're home. You know the games are Greek. You know their old Greek home was the religious sanctuary of Olympia. You may even know that Olympia was home to the gargantuan Statue of Zeus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But do you know what those ancient games were really like? They were abolished in A.D. 393, Zeus crumbled a few decades later, but the history is still there.

How the Games Began

The Greeks have been praising Nike for thousands of years. That's Nike, the ancient Greek goddess of victory, not the modern sneaker company.

According to legend, the first Olympics began in 776 B.C., with a dusty, barefoot race held during Olympia's Zeus festival. After that, when Greeks flocked to Olympia's rural sanctuary every four years to praise Zeus, they stayed for the thrill of Nike and the agony of defeat. Similar games were held at ancient Delphi and other sanctuaries, but Olympia's games reigned supreme.

Like their modern equivalents, these competitions were intended to reveal the most skilled athletes. But a lack of protective clothing, random pairings that failed to account for size or skill, and few rules made the ancient Olympics into a most dangerous game. Ancient fans were as forgiving as a Russian gymnastics coach, and competitors could die trying to please the crowd.

Battered Ears, Broken Men

Forget familiar restrictions against low blows, kidney punches, and hitting a man while he's down. Ancient boxing was closer to a barroom brawl. Fighters were free to unleash a flurry of blows on a cowering opponent if they felt like it. Rounds didn't exist; men simply fought until one cried uncle or got knocked out cold.

At first, boxers wrapped supple leather straps called himantes around their hands to lessen the impact of their blows. With each passing Olympiad, the straps grew harder. In some cases, metal was added for an especially memorable right hook. It's hardly surprising, then, that in one of his dialogues, Plato refers to boxers as "those with the battered ears."

Wrestlers had to observe a few more rules. No biting, eye-gouging, or genital grabbing, please. But choke holds and joint locks were legit. One particularly violent event, the pankration, combined wrestling and boxing. Athletes fought bare-handed (without himantes), punching, kicking, and grappling to win. On one occasion, an athlete who was strangled to death during a match was judged the winner, and his corpse was crowned with the prized olive wreath.

The Quick and the Nude

The fleet of foot enjoyed prominent status even among champion athletes, as most Greeks had grown up listening to legends of the half mortal, half divine Hercules, who ran great distances as a test of strength. Olympic athletes proudly ran their distances barefoot and naked, but legend suggests that wasn't always so. An ancient story circulated that the tradition of nudity began in 720 B.C. when an eager sprinter simply lost his shorts.

Competitors had four races to choose from, all measured by the length of the 192-meter stadium. The first was called the stadion, a sprint exactly one stadium long. The next race was double that length, while the third was long distance--between 7 and 24 stades.

The other race was the hoplitodromos, an exhausting two- to four-stade sprint by runners encumbered with 60 pounds of hoplite armor. Eventually, nakedness won out there, too, and racers grabbed just helmets and shields. A starting rope ensured few jumped the gun; those who did were beaten.

Chariots of Fire

Greek jockeys also competed sans pants. No saddles or stirrups either. And they never got much credit for being real athletes. As in modern times, it was expensive to buy, stable, and train a horse. Jockeys were considered mere employees. When a race was won, the owner, and not the rider, was crowned with the olive wreath.

The real glamour lay in the chariot races, easily the equivalent of today's NASCAR. Spectators held their breath waiting for a good chariot crash. The four-horse chariot race, called the tethrippon, was the real crowd pleaser--thrilling to watch, easy to bet on, and terribly expensive for owners. According to some accounts, Greek women could vie for the olive wreath in this category as horse owners, though under practically every other circumstance, married women were expressly forbidden to watch the games.

Complaints that the horse races were rigged cropped up frequently. In A.D. 67, the extravagant and eccentric Roman emperor Nero staged a unique ten-horse chariot race. Judges declared him the winner despite the fact that he fell from his chariot and failed to complete the course. Later historians duly struck Nero's name from the list of champions.

And for the Overachiever . . .

There was the pentathlon--"pent" for five events: sprinting, long jumping, javelin hurling, discus throwing, and wrestling. The philosopher Aristotle called pentathlon competitors the most beautiful athletes of all, since their bodies were "capable of enduring all efforts."

Discus and javelin hurling required balance, agility, and strength. The saucer-shaped discus was more or less a lead or stone frisbee that varied in size, while the wood javelin was a six-foot pole with a leather thong near the center that let the hurler keep a firm hold. Long jumpers used barbell-shaped weights called halteres to increase their distance, in a swinging motion that physicists say really does work.

The games concluded as they began: with a sacrifice to the gods. Winners returned home to be feted with banquets, parades, and money. Some were even granted free meals for the rest of their lives. The defeated went home in disgrace.

Claire Vail
August 12, 2004

Want to learn more?
Tour ancient Olympia
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Olympics/site_1.html

(photo/painting credit-16th century Dutch artist Maertan van Heemskerck)