Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Modern Olympic Games

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Almost 2,800 years ago the Ancient Greeks held a sporting event every four years on Mount Olympus. The festival was part competition, part religious celebration, and it was considered so important that wars would come to a halt in honor of the games. Then in the 19th century, one man came up with the idea of bringing the games back to life. Learn more about the Modern Olympic Movement on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Almost 2,800 years ago, the ancient Greeks held a sporting event every four years on Mount Olympus. The festival was part competition, part religious celebration, and was considered so important that wars would come to a halt in honor of the games. Then in the 19th century, one man came up with the idea of bringing the games back to life. Learn more about the modern Olympic movement on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by CuriosityStream. If you plan on watching the Olympics, you might want to get some background on the games you'll be watching. Curiosity Stream has programs on the Olympics, ancient Greece, and many individual sports. And that's on top of the over 2,000 educational programs on a wide range of other subjects. You can get an entire year of CuriosityStream for less than $20. It's so cheap that you almost can't afford to not get it. If you're remotely curious about the world you live in, and let's face it, you are because you're listening to this podcast.

Go to everything-dash everywhere.com slash curiosity stream to start your subscription. today. Once again, that's Everything- Everywhere.com slash curiosity stream. The Olympics get their name from Mount Olympus, which was the legendary home of the Greek gods. According to Aristotle, the first Olympics were held in the year

776 BC. This state is mostly accepted by historians and archaeological evidence. If it isn't accurate, then it's probably pretty close. The competitors came from city, states, and kingdoms from Greater Greece, who all held the same religious beliefs and the pantheon of Greek gods. The first Olympics only had one event called the stadium. This was a running event of a

distance of about 190 meters. The Greek word stadion is where the English word stadium comes from. Over time, other events were added, including wrestling, discus, javelin, long jump, shot put, equestrian, and one event called pancreation. Pancration was sort of a mixture of boxing and wrestling, and it was probably closer to modern day mixed martial arts. I should note that all of the ancient competitors and spectators were men and everyone competed naked. The Olympics continued through most of the Roman period and didn't formally end until the year 393, when the Emperor Theodosius I outlawed all paganism and pagan rights. The Olympics were never really forgotten, but it was just a historical note, not something

that anyone really had any desire to resurrect. The term Olympics began being generally used for organized athletic events. There were 17th century games in England called the Cotswold Olympics. Olympics. During the French Revolution, there was an event called the La Olympia de Republic. Throughout the 19th century, the term began being used for a whole host of athletic events throughout Europe. However, none of them have any connection to the modern-day Olympics. The modern Olympics can trace its roots back to a French baron named Pierre de Coberton. DeCobarton was an academic who was an advocate of athletic activity as a means of good health.

In 1892, he came up with the idea of hosting an international athletic festival that would serve as something for people to aspire to. Specifically, he wanted to revive the ancient Olympic festival, and like the ancient Games, hold them every four years. Unlike the original Olympic Games, these new Olympic Games would be open to people from all countries on Earth. In 1894, the Sorbonne in Paris, he held an international conference on sports, which was attended by 79 delegates from nine countries. There, they unanimously approved the creation of the International Olympic Committee, or the IOC. The IOC then agreed to hold the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.

Athens was selected to honor the ancient games which were also held in Greece. The first games had representatives from 14 nations with 241 athletes who competed in 43 events. All of the nations represented were from Europe, save for the contingent from the United States. A full 65% of the athletes in attendance at the first Olympics were from Greece. The medals given out at the first games were actually silver to the winners and copper to the runners-up, and these were later retroactively changed to gold, silver, and bronze to reflect the current metal scheme. The events at the first Olympic games included tennis, swimming, shooting, weightlifting, fencing, gymnastics, wrestling, and track and field.

Overall, the first Olympics were considered as success. However, that wasn't the case for the Olympics which followed. The 1900 Olympics were held in Paris alongside the Paris World's Fair, and if you've listened to enough episodes, you probably realize now that Paris had a lot of world's fairs. The 1904 Olympics were held in St. Louis alongside the St. Louis World's Fair. I addressed the St. Louis Games in my episode about the 1904 Marathon, which was the worst event ever held in Olympic history. Both 1900 and 1904 didn't get much attention or publicity. They were overshadowed by the larger events that they were held with, and they were more of

an afterthought by the event organizers. The 1900 games in Paris, did have the first women participate as competitors. There were 22 women who competed in five events, tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian, and golf. In 1906, another Olympics was held just two years after the St. Louis Games, and this one was again in Athens. Because it was held only two years after the previous Olympics, it was called the Intercolated Games. These games were much more popular than the previous two, but they were later retconned to not be an official Olympics by the IOC.

You will not find the 1906 Olympics on any official list of past Olympic games. As the Olympics expanded, they added more events. At the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, one of the events was figure skating. Skating was held several months after most of the events in October, but it was considered part of the Summer Olympics. Likewise, one of the shooting events was Olympic dueling. Contestants fired dueling pistols at dummies at 20 or 30 paces. And honestly, this would be a far cooler event. if it was real dueling, because there would be no need to issue silver or bronze medals.

1908 also saw the creation of standard rules for events and international committees, judges, and officials to oversee the events. Prior to this, it was always done by the host country. One of the defining characteristics of the early Olympics was amateurism. When the Olympics first started, Pierre de Coburton actually had a rather flexible definition of amateurism. While he didn't think that prize money should be given out for the Olympic Games, he felt that the definition of amateurism should evolve over time. However, the Olympic definition of amateurism eventually became extremely draconian over time. At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, American Jim Thorpe won gold medals in both the decathlon and the pentathlon. But because he received $2 per game

for playing baseball, a sport which wasn't even in the Olympics at the time, two years earlier, he was stripped of his medals. 1912 also saw the addition of an art competition to the Olympics. Art was a feature of the Summer Olympics until 1948. The events each year varied, but they usually consisted of literature, music, architecture, painting, and sculpture. Believe it or not, there are actually two people who won medals in both sports and art. American Walter Winnis won a gold medal in shooting and in sculpture.

And Hungarian Alfred Hajos won a gold medal in swimming and a silver medal in architecture. texture. The 1916 Olympics, which were scheduled to take place in Berlin, became the first Olympics to be cancelled due to the First World War. After trying to include figure skating and hockey at the 1920 games in Antwerp, the IOC agreed to hold a separate Winter Olympics in 1924 in Chamois, France. By this time, the Olympics had clearly become the premier international sporting event. Winning an Olympic medal was considered the highest accomplishment in most sports. Politics began to insert itself into the Olympics in a way that it was a way that it was a it hadn't in the past. Munich was the host in 1936, and the German government led by

Adolf Hitler used the games for propaganda purposes. The Second World War canceled the 1940 games which were scheduled to take place in Tokyo. It would have been the first Olympics in Asia. Likewise, the 1944 games, which were scheduled for London, were canceled as well. After a 12-year hiatus, London finally held their games in 1948. Germany and Japan were not invited to these games, and the Soviet Union chose not to participate. Despite their absence, there were 59 countries represented in 1948, which was the most of any Olympics. Over the next several decades, there were two large-scale trends which dominated the games.

The increasing number of countries represented, as more countries became independent via decolonization, and the use of sports as a proxy for national competition during the Cold War. By the 1976 games in Montreal, 96 countries were represented. However, the next two Olympics were marred by Cold War politics. The 1980 games in Moscow were boycotted by many Western countries led by the United States. In response, the 1984 games in Los Angeles were boycotted by the Soviet Union and other communist countries. The end of the Cold War resulted in significant changes for the Olympics. In 1992, professional athletes were finally allowed to compete.

While they didn't make any money from the Olympics itself, they were able to make money from endorsements and other competitions. 1992 also saw the last year the Winter and Summer Olympics were held in the same year. Starting in 1994, the Winter and Summer Games were now always held two years apart. Today, hosting an Olympics has become an enormous undertaking. In the past, cities fiercely competed to host an Olympics because of all the international prestige that came with hosting the games. However, the requirements for hosting have skyrocketed. The cost of hosting the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro was estimated to be over 3,000, $13 billion. It took the city of Montreal 30 years to pay off its debt from hosting the 1976 Olympics.

The host for the 2028 and 2032 Olympics have already been announced, Los Angeles and Brisbane. In both cases, they were the only city that was in the running and were basically awarded the Olympics by default. No one else wanted to host the games. Today, there are proposals for permanent Olympic host cities. There would be one city in Europe, one in Asia, and one in North America, which would rotate hosting the Olympics. And then every fourth Olympics, it would be held somewhere else. Each of the permanent host cities wouldn't have to build new facilities each time, and it would reduce the cost of hosting the games. One of the reasons why Los Angeles was willing to host the Olympics again is because almost everything needed was already built. The Olympics today are a multi-billion dollar affair.

Television rights, marketing deals, and licensing make the modern Olympics, a totally different beast than Pierre de Cobraean could ever have imagined. There are more sports, more countries, more athletes, and more money involved than ever before. Nonetheless, even for multi-millionaire athletes, winning an Olympic medal is still the pinnacle of athletic success. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even operational. opportunities for a show producer credit.

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