The Ancient Olympics Tales
The Ancient Olympics Tales
Blog Article
The Ancient Olympics were many things: glorious, grimy, sacred, sweaty, and occasionally absurd.
They weren’t invented for sport, not really. They were a religious ceremony with biceps. A way to
honour Zeus by stripping off your tunic, oiling up like a roast chicken, and hurling a discus while
thousands of drunk spectators cheered from the sidelines. And that was just day one.
Back in 776 BCE, the first recorded Olympic Games took place in Olympia, a dusty patch of
Peloponnesian earth chosen not for its convenient parking but because it had a decent temple and
a vague mythological claim to being important. No one thought to build bleachers. The crowd just
piled in, eating olives, shouting at sprinters, and probably having existential debates about fate and
figs.
Only free Greek men could compete. No women allowed, not even to watch. Unless you were
sneaky about it. Which brings us to Kallipateira.
Kallipateira had Olympic blood in her veins. Her father, brother, son, and nephew were all
champions. But the Ancient Olympics banned married women, which she was. So, she disguised
herself as a male trainer, slipped in with the athletes, and watched her son win. When she jumped
the fence to congratulate him, her robes got caught. The crowd gasped. A woman! Scandal!
Security (probably a man in a bedsheet) rushed forward. But instead of punishment, she got
applause. Her family’s legacy was just too good. Officials changed the rules again though—from
then on, all trainers had to be naked too. Ancient bureaucracy, ladies and gentlemen.
The athletes weren’t competing for medals. Gold, silver, bronze? Please. That was for future
civilisations with taste. Ancient Olympians got a wreath of wild olive leaves. But fame? That was
eternal. Victors returned to their cities as heroes. Statues were carved, songs composed, taxes
possibly dodged. And if you lost? Tough. You might as well have stayed home weaving.
The events were a mix of athleticism and ancient chaos. Take the stadion, a sprint about 200
metres long. No lanes. No false start sensors. Just a line of oiled men, each hoping not to trip on
someone else’s sandal-sized foot. The pentathlon followed, involving discus, javelin, long jump,
running, and wrestling. Sounds noble until you remember the long jump involved leaping while
holding weights and the wrestling often ended with someone having their elbow twisted like an
octopus in a blender.
Then there was pankration. Imagine a cage fight, but without the cage and with fewer rules. A
brutal blend of boxing and wrestling where almost anything went except biting and eye gouging.
The Spartans loved it, obviously. Competitors sometimes died. One legend tells of Arrhichion of
Phigalia, who won posthumously. He managed to choke his opponent while being strangled. When
the opponent tapped out, Arrhichion was declared the winner—despite being extremely dead. The
crowd cheered, the corpse got a statue, and nobody saw the problem.
Cheating wasn’t unheard of, either. Athletes bribed judges. Trainers paid off rivals. Spectators
placed sneaky bets. The organisers eventually erected a row of bronze statues called the Zanes,
paid for by fines from cheating athletes. Each statue had an inscription shaming the offender. They
lined the path to the stadium so every hopeful sprinter had to pass their grinning bronze
predecessors with a reminder: play fair, or at least don’t get caught.
Not every event was blood and bravado. There was the chariot race, held in the hippodrome, a
dust-blown arena of swirling hooves and cracked wheels. The riders didn’t even own the
chariots—they were usually slaves or hired drivers, while the rich aristocrats watched from the
shade, sipping diluted wine and pretending they understood horse psychology.
And of course, there was the sacrifice. No Ancient Olympics was complete without the whiff of
roasted ox. One hundred of them, in fact, offered to Zeus on the grand altar at Olympia. Meat for
the gods, and maybe a few select humans who hung around long enough to nab the leftovers.
Religion clung to every aspect. Before competing, athletes swore oaths at the Temple of Zeus,
promising not to cheat. (Charming, considering how many Kallipateira did.) Victors sometimes credited their
success to divine favour. Some claimed to be descended from gods themselves. Modesty wasn’t
an Olympic virtue.
The Olympic truce—ekechiria, as they called it—was proclaimed before each Games. All wars had
to stop. Theoretically, anyway. If two city-states were in the middle of stabbing each other, they
paused for the Games, then resumed afterwards with refreshed vigour and perhaps slightly better
sprint times.
The Games happened every four years, a cycle so regular it became the Greek calendar’s
heartbeat. Whole decades were measured in Olympiads. If someone asked, "When was that
battle?" the answer might be, "Three Olympiads after the great farting incident of Pindar the Elder."
Food, drink, and general mayhem filled Olympia during the Games. Merchants hawked everything
from perfume to philosophy. Philosophers delivered speeches to anyone not actively sprinting or
wrestling. Poets tried to get commissions from newly minted champions. Artists sketched,
musicians played, pickpockets thrived.
Over time, the Olympics got bigger. More events, more competitors, more cheating. Romans got
involved. Things got weirder. Emperor Nero once competed in the chariot race with ten horses (the
usual was four), fell off, and still declared himself the winner. No one argued. He was the Emperor.
He also won musical competitions despite being about as tuneful as a constipated goat. The
Olympics became a playground for ego.
Eventually, the Games were banned in 393 CE by the Christian Emperor Theodosius I, who
considered them a bit too pagan for his taste. That was that. Olympia was abandoned. The
stadium crumbled. Olive wreaths withered. For over a millennium, the world forgot about the naked
glory days of pankration and poetic cheating.
Fast forward to 1896, and a Greek named Evangelos Zappas (and later Baron Pierre de
Coubertin) brought the Olympics back. Not quite the same, of course. No sacrifices, fewer naked
men, and slightly more health and safety regulations. But the spirit, that slightly unhinged blend of
ambition, honour, and competitive lunacy, lingered.
We owe quite a bit to those original Games. The marathon, for instance, wasn’t actually part of the
Ancient Olympics, but the modern version stole the myth of Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon
to Athens to deliver news of a victory, then collapsed and died. Which is exactly the kind of uplifting
tale someone thought would make a great Sunday hobby.
Even the word "stadium" comes from the Ancient Greek "stadion." So next time you find yourself in
one, maybe pause and think about a naked, oiled man in sandals sprinting to win an olive branch
while Zeus watches from above with a bemused smirk.
The Ancient Olympics weren’t just a sports event. They were a festival of human absurdity. Equal
parts sacred and ridiculous. The birthplace of every awkward podium moment, every dispute about
doping, every victory dance, and every underdog story. A sweaty, dusty, poetic mess of muscle and
myth.
And they started it all by throwing a discus at Zeus and hoping for the best.