History of the Olympic Games

Introduction

The Olympic Games are the largest and most widely watched sporting event in human history, a recurring gathering of athletes from every inhabited continent who compete every two years in a quadrennial cycle that alternates between a Summer Games and a Winter Games. More than two hundred national delegations parade into the opening ceremony of each modern Olympic edition, and the television audience for the spectacle exceeds three billion people, more than a third of the human race. Yet the Olympic movement is far older than the modern Games themselves, and the modern Games are far younger than the cultural authority they have come to wield. To understand the Olympics is to trace a story that begins in the eighth century before the common era at a sanctuary in the western Peloponnese, falls silent for fifteen centuries, and is revived at the end of the nineteenth century by a French baron who believed that international sport could heal the wounds of nationalism.

The history of the Olympic Games is the history of athletic competition, but it is also the history of religion, war, politics, commerce, broadcast technology, racial and gender exclusion and inclusion, urban planning, and the persistent human desire to find peaceful arenas for national rivalry. Few institutions in the modern world carry so much symbolic weight on so slender a thread of continuity with their ancient namesake. The five interlocking rings designed in 1913, the lighting of the Olympic flame in Olympia and its journey by relay to the host city, the procession of teams by nation behind their flags, and the recitation of the Olympic oath are all twentieth-century inventions presented as the recovery of ancient practice. The brilliance of the Olympic movement lies precisely in this productive confusion of myth and history, in its capacity to make a recently invented tradition feel eternal.

This article surveys the full sweep of Olympic history from the ancient sanctuary of Olympia through the Theodosian suppression, the long medieval silence, the nineteenth-century revivals, the founding of the modern movement in Paris in 1894, the first modern Games in Athens in 1896, the chaotic early decades, the addition of the Winter Games, the politicization of the Games during the Cold War, the boycotts, the commercial transformation that began at Los Angeles in 1984, the Paralympic movement, the doping crises, the host-city debates, and the games of the twenty-first century from Sydney to Paris. It considers the iconic athletes whose performances have defined the public memory of the Games, the cities whose ambition and debt have shaped urban policy across the globe, and the recurring tensions between the Olympic ideal of universal sport and the political, commercial, and ethical pressures that constantly test it. The Olympic Games are unlike any other event humans have invented, and their story is among the great cultural narratives of the modern world.

The Ancient Olympic Games

The ancient Olympic Games were first held, according to the traditional Greek reckoning, in the year 776 BCE at the sanctuary of Olympia in Elis, in the western Peloponnese, and they continued at four-year intervals for nearly twelve centuries until they were suppressed by imperial decree in the late fourth century of the common era. The site of Olympia was not a city but a religious complex sacred to Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, and the Games were originally a religious festival in his honor, one of four great athletic and religious festivals of ancient Greece. The other three were the Pythian Games at Delphi, sacred to Apollo, the Nemean Games at Nemea, also sacred to Zeus, and the Isthmian Games at Corinth, sacred to Poseidon. Together these four constituted the Panhellenic Games, the periodos circuit on which the most accomplished athletes built reputations that endured for generations.

The traditional founding date of 776 BCE marks the first Olympics for which the Greeks preserved the name of the victor in the principal contest, the stadion, a sprint of approximately 192 meters down the length of the stadium. The winner of the stadion gave his name to the entire four-year period, and Greek chronologists used these Olympiad numbers as a method of dating events across the wider Greek world. The first recorded Olympic victor was Coroebus of Elis, a cook by trade, whose name has survived because the Greek polymath Hippias of Elis compiled a list of Olympic victors in the fifth century BCE that subsequent historians used and extended. Whether 776 BCE was truly the inaugural Games or only the first for which records survived is a question modern historians cannot definitively resolve, but the date became the canonical starting point of Greek historical reckoning.