The Olympic Games are an international sports festival that began in ancient Greece. The original Greek games were staged every fourth year for several hundred years, until they were abolished in the early Christian era. The revival of the Olympic Games took place in 1896, and since then they have been staged every fourth year, except during World War I and World War II (1916, 1940, 1944). Perhaps the basic difference between the ancient and modern Olympics is that the former was the ancient Greeks' way of saluting their gods, whereas the modern Games are a manner of saluting the athletic talents of citizens of all nations. The original Olympics featured competition in music, oratory, and theater performances as well. The modern Games have a more expansive athletic agenda, and for two and one-half weeks they are supposed to replace the rancor of international conflict with friendly competition. In recent times, however, that lofty ideal has not always been attained. THE ANCIENT OLYMPICS The earliest reliable date that recorded history gives for the first Olympics is 776 BC, although virtually all historians presume that the Games began well before then. It is certain that during the midsummer of 776 BC a festival was held at Olympia on the highly civilized eastern coast of the Peloponnesian peninsula. That festival remained a regularly scheduled event, taking place during the pre-Christian golden age of Greece. As a testimony to the religious nature of the Games (which were held in honor of Zeus, the most important god in the ancient Greek pantheon), all wars would cease during the contests. According to the earliest records, only one athletic event was held in the ancient Olympics--a foot race of about 183 m (200 yd), or the length of the stadium. A cook, Coroibus of Elis, was the first recorded winner. The first few Olympics had only local appeal and were limited to one race on one day; only men were allowed to compete or attend. A second race--twice the length of the stadium--was added in the 14th Olympics, and a still longer race was added to the next competition, 4 years later. When the powerful, warlike Spartans began to compete, they influenced the agenda. The 18th Olympics included wrestling and a pentathlon consisting of running, jumping, spear throwing (the javelin), discus throwing, and wrestling. Boxing was added at the 23d Olympiad, and the Games continued to expand, with the addition of chariot racing and other sports. In the 37th Olympiad (632 BC) the format was extended to 5 days of competition. The growth of the Games fostered "professionalism" among the competitors, and the Olympic ideals waned as royalty began to compete for personal gain, particularly in the chariot events. Human beings were being glorified as well as the gods; many winners erected statues to deify themselves. In AD 394 the Games were officially ended by the Roman emperor Theodosius, who felt that they had pagan connotations. THE MODERN OLYMPICS Development The revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, unlike the original Games, has a clear, concise history. Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), a young French nobleman, felt that he could institute an educational program in France that approximated the ancient Greek notion of a balanced development of mind and body. The Greeks themselves had tried to revive the Olympics by holding local athletic games in Athens during the 1800s, but without lasting success. It was Baron de Coubertin's determination and organizational genius, however, that gave impetus to the modern Olympic movement. In 1892 he addressed a meeting of the Union des Sports Athletiques in Paris. Despite meager response he persisted, and an international sports congress eventually convened on June 16, 1894. With delegates from Belgium, England, France, Greece, Italy, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United States in attendance, he advocated the revival of the Olympic Games. He found ready and unanimous support from the nine countries. De Coubertin had initially planned to hold the Olympic Games in France, but the representatives convinced him that Greece was the appropriate country to host the first modern Olympics. The council did agree that the Olympics would move every 4 years to other great cities of the world. Thirteen countries competed at the Athens Games in 1896. Nine sports were on the agenda: cycling, fencing, gymnastics, lawn tennis, shooting, swimming, track and field, weight lifting, and wrestling. The 14-man U.S. team dominated the track and field events, taking first place in 9 of the 12 events. The Games were a success, and a second Olympiad, to be held in France, was scheduled. Olympic Games were held in 1900 and 1904, and by 1908 the number of competitors more than quadrupled the number at Athens--from 311 to 2,082. Beginning in 1924 a Winter Olympics was included--to be held at a separate cold-weather sports site in the same year as the Summer Games--the first held at Chamonix, France. In 1984 about 1,510 athletes from 49 nations competed at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in a program that included Alpine and Nordic skiing, biathlon, ice hockey, figure skating, speed skating, bobsledding, and luge. But the Summer Games, with its wide array of events, are still the focal point of the modern Olympics. The standard events are archery, basketball, boxing, canoeing and kayaking, cycling, equestrian arts, fencing, field hockey, gymnastics, handball, judo, modern pentathlon, rowing, shooting, soccer, swimming and diving and synchronized swimming, track and field, volleyball, water polo, weight lifting, wrestling (both freestyle and Greco-Roman), and yachting. The Games are governed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose headquarters is in Lausanne, Switzerland. Great Olympic Athletes Although the Olympic Games have been increasingly politicized (see the following section, Politics and the Games), the ideal of the world's best athletes competing against each other in the arena of so-called pure sport has been at least partially realized, especially from the athletes' point of view. And even though skill and courage are manifested by most Olympic participants, the great gold medalists are the ones who are most often remembered. In 1912, Jim \TThorpe\t, an American Indian, won both the decathlon and pentathlon in Stockholm; Thorpe was eventually honored as the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century. Over three Olympiads (1920, Antwerp; 1924, Paris; and 1928, Amsterdam), Paavo \TNurmi\t, the Flying Finn, earned 6 individual gold medals in running, for distances from 1,500 m to 10,000 m. In 1924 and 1928, Nurmi's accomplishments were accompanied by those of U.S. swimmer Johnny \TWeissmuller\t, who took 5 gold medals in the freestyle sprints. In the 1932 Olympics, held in Los Angeles, American athlete Babe Didrikson \TZaharias\t won 3 medals--2 gold, in the javelin and 80-m hurdles, and a silver, in the high jump. When Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Games in Berlin as a showcase for Aryan supremacy, the black American Jesse \TOwens\t won 4 gold medals in what many experts consider the best track and field performance in Olympic history. Unheralded 17-year-old Bob \TMathias\t arrived in London for the 1948 Games and astonished all with his victory in the decathlon; he repeated his feat in 1952 to become the only two-time decathlon winner. The Helsinki Games of 1952 belonged, however, to Emil "The Terrible" \TZatopek\t of Czechoslovakia, who became, and still is, the only man in Olympic history to win the 5,000 m, 10,000 m, and marathon in a single Olympiad. Also in 1952, U.S. diver Patricia \TMcCormick\t won both golds in women's diving, and she became the only person to repeat this double victory when she won again in 1956. The Melbourne Games of 1956 were the beginning of two other notable winning streaks spread over several Olympics--Al \TOerter\t of the United States garnered the first of 4 consecutive discus titles (1956-68), a feat never equaled in any event, and swimmer Dawn \TFraser\t of Australia won the first of her 3 consecutive gold medals (1956-64) in the 100-m freestyle. The Olympics in Rome, in 1960, marked a gold-medal performance by the U.S. basketball team that is said to be the finest in Olympic annals; the team included such All-Americans and future professionals as Oscar \TRobertson\t, Jerry \TWest\t, Jerry Lucas, Walt Bellamy, Terry Dischinger, Bob Boozer, Darrall Imhoff, and Adrian Smith, and their closest margin of victory was 24 points. Rome also marked the first gold medals for New Zealand's Peter \TSnell\t, in the 800-m run, and Ethiopia's Abebe \TBikila\t, who won the marathon running barefoot; they repeated their victories in Tokyo in 1964, with Snell also taking the gold in the Olympic "mile" (1,500 m). The 1968 Olympics in Mexico City were characterized by many great individual performances, but none was so spectacular as the long jump of Bob \TBeamon\t, who broke the world record by 55 cm (21.5 in). In 1972 in Munich, Mark \Tspitz\t earned 7 gold medals in swimming, more than anyone in any Olympiad. Lasse \TViren\t of Finland took gold medals in both the 5,000-m and 10,000-m runs, and he became the only man ever to repeat this double, in Montreal in 1976. Montreal was also the site of the emergence of Romania's Nadia \TComaneci\t, the marvelous 14-year-old gymnast who won 3 gold medals and accumulated 7 perfect scores during the competition. In both 1972 and 1976 the \TUSSR\t's Vasily \TAlexeyev\t won gold medals in the super-heavyweight weight-lifting division. And although the world's strongest man fared poorly at the Moscow Games in 1980 (and retired soon thereafter), his teammate, swimmer Vladimir Salnikov, was proclaimed the greatest distance swimmer of all time after winning gold in the 400-m and 1,500-m freestyle events. The Winter Olympics have witnessed outstanding performances as well. The Austrian Toni \TSailer\t won all 3 gold medals in men's Alpine skiing in 1956 (at Cortina da'Ampezzo, Italy), an achievement matched only once, by the Frenchman Jean Claude \TKilly\t in 1968 (at Grenoble, France). Sonja \THenie\t of Norway, still possibly the greatest of all figure skaters, won 3 consecutive gold medals (1928, St. Moritz, Switzerland; 1932, Lake Placid, N.Y.; and 1936, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Norway), and she was the first skater to parlay her athletic success into a lucrative career in entertainment. That path was also taken by such well-known American figure skaters as Dick \TButton\t (1948, St. Moritz; and 1952, Oslo), Carol Heiss (1960, Squaw Valley, Calif.), Peggy \TFleming\t (1968, Grenoble), Dorothy \THamill\t (1976, Innsbruck, Austria), and Scott \THamilton\t (1984, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia). In 1980, in Lake Placid, the underdog U.S. hockey team stirred America's spirits by snatching the gold medal from the heavily favored Soviets, and Eric \THeiden\t of Wisconsin won all 5 gold medals in men's speed skating, an unparalleled accomplishment. Although the U.S. team did not perform as well as expected overall at the 1984 Games, American Alpine skiers were much better than ever before--the \TMahre\t brothers, Phil and Steve, won gold and silver medals, respectively, in the slalom, and Bill \TJohnson\t took the gold in the men's downhill, the first such victory ever for an American; for the women, Debbie \TArmstrong\t earned the gold medal in the giant slalom, while teammate Christin Cooper followed with the silver. Almost all athletes who take part in the Olympic Games stress that, for them, the rites of Olympic passage are apolitical--that while there is, of course, a great sense of pride in competing for one's country, the cameraderie shared by the athletes is the most rewarding of Olympic experiences. Politics and the Games The ideology of nationalism, which swept the world during the early 20th century, left its mark on the Olympics. Athletic nationalism was brought to a peak by Nazi Germany, which staged the 1936 Games in Berlin and used the Olympics to propagandize its cause. The Germans built a powerful team through nationalized training and scientific advances and dominated the Games in terms of medals won. The political overtones of the Olympics did not lessen with the fall of Nazi Germany. In 1956, Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon boycotted the Melbourne Games to protest the Anglo-French seizure of the Suez Canal, and the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland boycotted as well to protest the \TUSSR\t's invasion of Hungary. In Mexico City in 1968, American blacks Tommie Smith and John Carlos used the victory pedestal to publicize their disdain for the racial policies of the United States. In Munich in 1972, 11 Israeli athletes were massacred by nonparticipating Palestinian terrorists. And in 1976 in Montreal, 33 African nations, to be represented by about 400 athletes, boycotted the Games to protest South Africa's apartheid policies. The most serious disruptions to the modern Olympics, however, occurred in 1980 and 1984. In 1980 the U.S. government led a boycott of the Summer Games in Moscow to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Under strong pressure from the Carter administration, the U.S. Olympic Committee voted to boycott the Games, thus depriving the Russians of their chief athletic competition. Although a total of 81 nations were represented in Moscow, about 40 nations followed the U.S. lead (among them West Germany, China, and Japan), depriving the Soviets of their chief athletic competition and raising doubts about the future of the Olympic movement. Such fears were well founded. Although the 1984 Winter Games, held early in the year in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, proceeded without boycotts, the Summer Games, held in Los Angeles, were undercut by an Eastern-bloc boycott led by the \TUSSR\t. Fear of an openly hostile environment in Los Angeles was cited by the Soviet Olympic Committee as the reason for the \TUSSR\t's nonparticipation, but most commentators believed the reasons to be political: a reflection of the poor state of recent U.S.-Soviet relations, simple revenge for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games, and possible embarrassment to the Soviets on worldwide television caused by planned anti-Soviet demonstrations and possible defections of Eastern-bloc athletes. The popularity and financial success of the 1984 Los Angeles Games were, however greater than anticipated. In the 24th Olympiad (1988), the Winter Games--held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada--were once again completed without international incident. At the Summer Games, in Seoul, South Korea, East and West met in Olympic competition for the first time since 1976, with only 6 nations (including Cuba and North Korea) boycotting. Despite some student demonstrations in Seoul, the focus of attention returned to the athletes themselves. One cloud was the suspicion that the use of performance-enhancing drugs was widespread, especially after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive and was stripped of his 100-m gold medal. Future sites for the Winter Olympic Games are: Albertville, France, in 1992; Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994; and Nagano, Japan, in 1998. The Summer Olympic Games are scheduled for: Barcelona, Spain, in 1992; and Atlanta, Ga., in 1996. Jim Benagh Bibliography: Associated Press and Grolier, Pursuit of Excellence: The Olympic Story (1983); Carlson, Lewis H., and Fogarty, John J., Tales of Gold: The Oral History of the Olympic Games Told by America's Gold Medal Winners (1987); Henry, Bill, et al., An Approved History of the Olympic Games (1984); Hoberman, John M., The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics, and the Moral Order (1986); Kieran, John, and Daley, Arthur, The Story of the Olympic Games: 776 BC to 1976 (1977); Killanin, Lord, and Rodda, John, eds., The Olympic Games (1976); Mandell, Richard D., The First Modern Olympics (1976); Raschke, Wendy J., ed., The Archaeology of the Olympics (1987); Schaap, Dick, Olympic Games, 1984: Sarajevo-Los Angeles (1984).