Olympics. The History of the Olympics. When Olympics started?

Olympics| Olympics are leading International games in various fields. Olympics are conducted after every 4 years. But this time Olympics are delayed due to Covid-19 Pandemic. The History of the Olympics is very interesting and also the birth of these Games. So in this topic, we are going to discuss the history of the Olympics and When did these all start and how? So let's start :

 

The Origin and History of Olympics :

At the Olympics, we all have a favorite athlete or event in the games. Most people know that the Olympics were started in ancient Greece, and many people know that they were revived on an international scale in 1896. Every four years without fail the Summer Games astound us. We all want to see our favorite athlete when a small round neck decoration, but the games were not always the international media event they are today. In fact, prior to 1896, there hadn't been a true Olympics in over a thousand years. The Olympics of ancient Greece differed wildly from what we watch on NBC today. To understand the Olympics we have to go back to where it all began in 776 BC. A single-foot race was, won by a small-town cook named Corey Avis. For the first few Olympics there was really only one event the foot race. Sprinters would line up on a short track that was about 176 meters long. A measurement called a Stadia in Greek when the Romans pilfered the word they called the distance a Stadion. We stole the word from Latin and let Taylor Swift fill stadiums with fans instead of foot races. Over time more events were added different race lengths came first, such as the Diablos and the Dolichos which would roughly translate to the 400 meters and 5000 meters today. They also held a race in full armor in order to simulate running in combat but man cannot live on running alone and soon a Pentathlon emerged with the long jump, discus throw, javelin toss, wrestling, and of course more running. Boxing and Horse races were also added, weirdly though the winners of the horse races were not the jockeys or charioteers but the owners of the horses. This led a very famous Greek named Alcibiades to enter seven teams in a single race and he took first second and fourth place. After the Olympics reached maturity essentially every Greek city-state participated in them, they became a cultural unifier amidst diverse and warring States. Like today the games were a peaceful collaboration between both friends and enemies, even though Greeks never truly stopped fighting wars with each other a truce emerged that would at a minimum protect athletes who were gathering for the games. But unlike today the events were a violent mess, the chariot races frequently ended in multiple deaths from horse-on-horse pile-ups. Instead of gloves boxers would tie rough leather around their hands in order to maximize the pain inflicted. Wrestling frequently ended in the death of one participant, the only ways to win were to kill the opponent or force them to surrender by raising one finger which would be the ancient version of tapping out. During a bout in 564 BC, a dead man won a wrestling match by breaking his opponent's foot moments before dying, the pain caused the opponent to surrender only to realize he'd already killed his fellow athlete. Even after the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC the games continued for a while, but they only got more scandalous and violent under the Romans and for Romans, anything that should be done should be overdone, and the violence cut a bit out of control. The boxers upgraded from rough leather up to full-on spikes meant to make their opponents bleed. Whether or not we think this is okay today this blood sport element made the games even more popular at the time. As time went on and the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, a small religion you may have heard of it called Christianity emerged. 

The Olympics always had a strong religious element to them, they were held in honor of Zeus after all and the priests of Greek paganism were the ones to actually crown the winners of the games. The religious part of the Olympics was never forgotten and as Christianity spread throughout the Empire the violence and paganism were starting to offend a large part of the denizens of Rome. In 394 AD, a Roman Emperor named Theodosius the first made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and he banned the Olympics. The final nail in the Olympic coffin came in 426 AD when Theodosius 2^nd  destroyed the temple of Zeus in Olympia. The Olympics had a few brief revivals in the 17th and 18th centuries but the modern Olympic movement did not begin until nearly the end of the 19th century. A man named Baron Pierre de Coubertin became enthralled with the Olympics and he was a pioneer in the effort of restarting the games. But he was largely wrong about the nature of the ancient Greek games. Coubertin imagined it as an idealization of manliness where unpaid athletes came together as gentlemen to determine who was the most honorable. He once composed that "the significant thing in life isn't the victory yet the battle not to have vanquished yet to have battled well". Greek athletes would have preferred to conquer they were not 19th-century gentlemen dueling for the honor. Greeks are damned though amateur athletes competing for neck decorations was the name of the game from here on. One of Coober's teen's inspirations was a man named William Brooks who founded the Winlock Olympian Society in England. Over time Brooke society grew and began working with the Liverpool Athletic Club in order to create the National Olympian Association. Their first Olympian games in London drew 10,000 spectators and Brooks knew that the games could be a huge hit. He reached out to Coubertin in 1890 and together they managed to hold an Olympic Congress on June 23rd, 1894. From here the International Olympic Committee was formed and the first games were scheduled to Athens in 1896, and just like Coubertin desired only unpaid amateur athletes were allowed. The first modern Olympic served as the perfect bridge between the old and new games, like the old games the first winner of the marathon was a Greek man who won after two days of constant fasting and prayer. Like the new games, the water in the swimming events was unsuitable for human life. The 100 500 and 1200 meter freestyle was held in the sea, where the water was freezing and waves were constantly crashing against the swimmers. 20,000 people came to watch swimmers do their racing thing, only to find them shivering and trying to survive the ways. Perhaps because of the immature nature of the games or maybe just because of poor planning, lots of silly and unprofessional things happen during the first few Olympics, bad water would be a common theme. 

In 1904 the swimming competitions were held in a polluted green pond, which made some of the athletes sick. The marathon of 1904 was a complete an American named William Garcia suffered hemorrhages and almost died on the side of the road before being hospitalized just in time. A South African runner was chased a mile off paths by wild dogs, but perhaps most amusingly a Cuban runner named Andron Carvajal hitchhiked his way to the games, he was almost late and had to cut his trousers so they would look like running shorts. In the course of the race, he stole two peaches from a truck that refused to give him some ate some rotten apples laid down and took a nap to recover, and still finished fourth. After 1896, the Olympics fell into a bit of a rut the 1900 and 1904 Olympics were both held during World's Fairs and unfortunately, this drew most potential spectators away from the games, due to these two unsuccessful games and because the Greeks were throwing a hissy fit and wanted to host their own games every four years in Athens, The IOC decided to host an event called the intercalated Olympics in 1906 as a compromise. Even though at the time these were considered to be a true Olympic contest, today the International Olympic Committee doesn't officially recognize medals given at these games. However, it was still important because it introduced both the opening and closing ceremonies which today is as much a staple of the games as the events themselves. They were also the first to have an Olympic Village and to raise the national flags of the victors, the 1906 Games drew more spectators and were overall more successful than either of the previous games, this was largely due to Athens's more competent management. The 1906 games' popularity may have saved the modern Olympics, after the two massive flops in 1900 and 1904. However, Coubertin's no more intercalated games were held after this because of a combination of things. A failure to properly prepare for Athens 1910 coubertin's disapproval of intercalated games and perhaps most importantly World War 1. Right before World War one though the first major star of the Olympic Games emerged Jim Thorpe was the Michael Phelps of the 1912 Stockholm Games, he won two golds in the pentathlon and decathlon and the records he set and those events would stand for decades. At the closing ceremonies the king of Sweden presented Thorpe with his medals and prizes and said “you sir are the greatest athlete in the world” Jim simply responded “thanks king”. Unfortunately, Thorpe's story didn't end happily, his simple honesty was in many ways his downfall. As I mentioned earlier crew routine was dead set on the Olympics being an amateur affair most college athletes secretly competed in professional games during the summers, but they were smart and always did it under aliases. After Thorpe won his gold an article came out in the Worcester Telegram showing that he had competed in a professional baseball league for a small amount of pay. At the point when an examination came in progress Jim Thorpe kept in touch with the top of the Amateur Athletic Union saying "I trust that I will be mostly pardoned by the way that I was basically an Indian student and didn't thoroughly understand such things indeed, I didn't realize that I was fouling up because I was doing what I knew a few other schoolmen had done, then again, actually they didn't utilize their own names" after this the IOC stripped Thorpe of his awards and pronounced him an expert. This event haunted Jim for the rest of his life, he did have a relatively successful professional athletic career playing baseball for the New York Giants, American football and even becoming the first president of the APFC which would go on to become the NFL. Anyway, he always remembered losing his Olympic awards. One of his colleagues boss Meyers saw Thorpe crying one night and listened to him he said "You know boss, the ruler of Sweden gave me those trophies. He offered them to me. In any case, they removed them from me. They're mine boss! I won them no-nonsense." After making some troublesome memories looking for some kind of employment in the Great Depression, Jim Thorpe got dependent on liquor he did unspecialized temp jobs and even turned into a vendor marine in 1945. But Thorpe was never quite the same, sadly he never lived to see his medals reinstated. 30 years after his death the IOC gave him back his Golds and said he was the co-champion alongside his competition, though his records were never given back. Even though Jim Thorpe had a difficult life his legacy remains untouched in many polls he ranks as one of the best or the best 19th-century, athletes athlete, he proudly stands among the best Olympians of our time, like Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and Simone Biles. Nowadays in most Olympic events, professional sponsorships are allowed but many of the other traditions of the games go back to these first few Olympics. Even the world was one and two caused several Olympics to be canceled, today the spirit of peace in competition prevails just like in ancient Greece. At the Rio games for the first time in history a refugee team competed. The Olympics have always represented athletic conflict but in large part thanks to Pierre de Coubertin it has come to also represent peace. At any other time, the games would not have featured a team of refugees to show solidarity for their suffering. This idea of sports creating peace began with a simple truce in ancient Greece allowing athletes to travel safely. Today nothing helps us recognize the humanity of people in other countries more than watching the best athletes in the world march in the parade of Nations with their flags. Remembering where the Olympics came from helps us redefine where they are going.

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