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Olympic
Games
Winter Olympics  
These are the stats of the Olympic Games and
their Fascinating history.
 International Olympic Committee
History
The ancient Greeks loved a good contest. Every four years, beginning sometime around 900
BC, tens of thousands of sandal-wearing spectators descended on Olympia to cheer their
favorite runners, wrestlers, and bare-skinned boxers. But the Olympic games weren't the
only show in town. Three other festivals; the Isthmian games at Corinth, the Nemean games,
and the Pythian games at Delphi alternated with the Olympic festival. Ancient athletes
were required to register to compete, and rumors of Herculean opponents sometimes prompted
competitors to withdraw. The reason: Winning was everything. Take the pancratium, for
instance. The sport's only interdictions prohibited opponents from eye-gouging and biting;
strategically placed knee thrusts, strangulation, and sand-throwing, were all considered
to be part of the fun, at least for the spectators. The creed of the modern Olympics is:
The important thing in the Games is not winning but taking part. The essential thing is
not conquering but fighting well. The fact is that couldn't be further from the spirit of
the original Games. Winning and conquering were tantamount: Victory at the ancient Olympic
festivals was rewarded with a crown of olive leaves, while second- and third-place
finishers returned home undecorated. Today's three-tiered winners podiums had no place in
Olympia: You either won or lost, and losing wasn't pretty. Nor was winning always pretty,
for that matter. The rules of the brutal pancratium, which, freely translated, means to
make mince meat of your opponent didn't specify that the winner had to live to collect his
shrubbery. Arrichion, at 600 BC a pancratium competitor, might have had the Ancient Games
shortest tenure as Olympic victor: He died, records indicate, moments after his opponent
admitted defeat. To say that he "took part" and "fought well," we can
assume, would have been faint praise, indeed. Some 1,500 years after the Ancient Games
were abolished by imperial edict, a Frenchman decided the time was ripe to revive or, more
accurately, revise the Olympic ideal. Not that Pierre de Fredi, Baron de Coubertin (an
erstwhile fencer) was the first to stage a revival of the Games. As early as 1636, the
Cotswold Olympic Games celebrated the ancient festival; in the 1830s, Sweden halfheartedly
mounted the Jeux Olympiques Scandinaves; during the second half of the nineteenth century,
the Brits staged four decades of Olympian Games in Shropshire, complete with track and
field events, cricket, and cultural competitions; and between 1859 and 1889, Greece held
its own Panhellenic contests open only to Hellenic athletes. But Coubertin, who had been
commissioned by the French government to form a universal sports association in 1889, had
a grander global vision. Convinced that athletic competition built moral fiber, he was
determined to foment a social movement based on what he considered to be the Olympic
ideal. Peace, harmony, and internationalism were to be the cornerstones of the Modern
Olympic movement. In Paris, on November 25, 1892, the Baron publicly proposed resurrecting
the Olympic Games, and by 1894, the International Olympic Committee was born. Within two
years time, the Olympic Games were resurrected from their Athenian ashes: In April of
1896, 40,000 spectators pressed into the Panathenean Stadium, which had been reconstructed
on the site of an ancient stadium in Athens, to witness the athletic feats of the first
Modern Olympic heroes; and the rest the mind-blowing performances and sometimes tragic
defeats, the politics of inclusion, and the poetry of it all is history.
(This page is updated after every Olympic Games)
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