The History of the Modern Olympic Games

DDespite the Greek roots of the word “Olympic,” the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will bear little resemblance to the sporting tournaments of ancient Greece.

The ancient origins of the Olympics date back to a 776 BC foot race (known as the hoplitodromo) won by a cook named Koroibos of Elis, according to Jeremy Fuchs, a sports journalist and Olympic history book author. Total Olympics. Participants wore helmets and shields for this type of race, which were often religious tributes to Zeus. They attracted around 40,000 spectators to Olympia, where there is a statue of the Greek god. Cow sacrifices were the norm.

But the Olympics we know today actually date back to an 1890 sporting tournament in a small town in England called “Much Wenlock.” The town’s doctor, William Penny Brookes, was looking for a way to get the town’s 2,500 residents more excited about exercise. Since 1850, he had organized an annual tournament that featured sports such as football, cricket, blindfolded wheelbarrow racing, pig chasing, quoits (throwing rings near or around a pin), and “ring leaning.” , in which a man on horseback had to unhook a small ring hanging from a crossbar with a spear. Brookes founded the National Olympian Association, which brought together gymnastics, canoeing and cricket, and hosted a three-day festival in 1866 in London that attracted 10,000 spectators and competitors. Similar events began to emerge across England.

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The games caught the attention of Pierre de Coubertin, world champion in school sports. He placed an advert in the newspapers asking to find out more about physical education initiatives, and Brookes responded, inviting him to Much Wenlock. They immediately struck up a friendship and began to imagine a new type of sporting tournament in or near various world capitals. As fans of Greek culture, they wanted the tournament to harken back to ancient Greek sporting events. Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894.

And so, the first modern Olympics began in April 1896 in Athens, with 241 athletes from 14 nations competing in 43 events, including tennis, swimming and fencing. Spyridon Louis of Greece won the first marathon of the Games. Brookes died four months earlier, in December 1895, but his ideas were incorporated into the tournament. For example, there was an opening ceremony in which athletes marched through the city while children sang and spectators threw flower petals. The winners received laurel wreaths and medals with Nike, the Greek god of victory, emblazoned on them – just like the Olympic medals given out in the current era. As Coubertin wrote in an obituary for Brookes: “If the Olympic Games that modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survive today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr. William Penny Brookes.”

The Wenlock Olympian Society still organizes an annual sports tournament in Shropshire, England, and the aim of the Olympic Games hasn’t changed much since the first modern games in 1896: to encourage people to exercise and challenge themselves. As Fuchs says, the Olympics have always been “a competition to bring out the best in people.”