The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism

Chapter 8. Greece and the 1904 "American" Olympics

301 The leaders of the small Greek delegation to the St. Louis Olympics of 1904 viewed the Games through an ethnocentric and nationalist lens. The socalled revival of the ancient Greek Olympic Games and the decision to hold the first modern Games in Athens, in 1896, suddenly thrust Greece into the international limelight. The Greek hosts had failed in their bid to keep the Games permanently in Athens every four years. But a compromise with the International Olympic Committee (ioc) paved the way for Athens to organize “interim” Games, to be held in between the quadrennial regularly scheduled Olympics. The decision was taken over the objections of the head of the ioc, Pierre de Coubertin, and he retaliated by ensuring that those interim Games would never be granted the status of an official Olympics.1 The first of these interim Games (which turned out to be the only ones, because Greece was unable to continue to hold them) was scheduled for 1906, two years after the St. Louis Games. Therefore the Greek sporting establishment was far more concerned with planning for the interim Games of 1906 than it was with participating in the 1904 Olympics. Nonetheless, as far as the Greeks were concerned, the St. Louis Games were an important test of the ioc’s concept of rotating the Games among international venues that had prevailed over the Greek view that the Games ought to be held permanently in Greece. Thus, the leaders of the Greek delegation in St. Louis looked at those Games in order to elicit an affirmation of their own particular perspective on the Olympics. The initiatives they took in framing the organization of the Chapter 8. Greece and the 1904 “American” Olympics alexander kitroeff kitroeff 302 interim Games of 1906, generally considered as an important turning point in the history of the modern Olympics, echoed their reactions to what they witnessed in St. Louis. The Greek View of the Olympics Greek attitudes to physical exercise and sport in the nineteenth century were colored by a very strong sense of a cultural continuity between modern and ancient Greece. This claim was one of the cornerstones of modern Greek identity from the time Greece gained political independence in 1830. That the modern Greeks were the heirs of classical Greece was a concept that legitimized Greece in the eyes of the European powers and offered the Greeks themselves a sense of national worth that offset any sense of inferiority at their small country’s obvious shortcomings in relation to the more developed European states. Public life and cultural practices, therefore, were permeated by recourse to modern Greece’s ancient heritage.2 This was also true of the value placed on physical exercise and sport. The socioeconomically developed European nations were transforming informal games into a form of discipline and socialization into the norms of an industrialized society, and in some cases they promoted physical exercise as a way of training young men for military service. In contrast, Greece saw physical exercise and sporting activities as a way of affirming its ties with the classical past and celebrating its heritage. This was because although Greece became an independent sovereign state relatively early by European standards, in 1830, unlike Western Europe, it did not undergo the type of industrialization and social changes that helped generate a rationalized and utilitarian sporting culture. Nor did the country’s dominant religion, Greek Orthodoxy, experience the type of embrace of physical exercise that Protestantism did with the rise of “muscular Christianity.” Greek Orthodoxy’s reflective and metaphysical characteristics militated against any such development. Accordingly, organized sports made their appearance in the late nineteenth century in Greece as part of a social trend that produced a range of cultural associations led by Greece and the 1904 “American” Olympics 303 intellectuals and which is considered as the emergence of a “public sphere” in Athens, the country’s capital city.3 Greece’s own revival of the ancient Olympics, in the form of the Zappas Olympics, named after Evangelis Zappas, a Greek diaspora merchant who provided the funds, reflected the Greek sense that modern sport was in practice an imitation of ancient sports and in terms of their cultural meaning a celebration of ancient Greece. The Zappas Olympics, held four times between 1859 and 1889, included a range of sports, many of which were “ancient” sports, such as throwing the javelin...