Onward to the Olympics: Historical Perspectives on the Olympic Games (review)

While the International Olympic Committee and many Greeks have long claimed continuity between ancient and modern Olympics, contending that Pierre de Coubertin simply ‘revived’ the games after a break of some 1,500 years, the scholarship of the last forty emphatically rejects such claims of transhistorical identity. The differences between ancient and modern games and the societies that supported them far outnumber the similarities. The consensus is that Coubertin did not revive the games as he liked to claim but clothed a totally modern festival in the garb of antiquity for contemporary ideological reasons.

This collection, the proceedings of a conference held during the buildup to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, where ancient and modern images were constantly intertwined, consciously seeks to address questions of comparison. Yet most of the papers contribute to and elaborate upon the consensus. The first, longest, and strongest section of the book deals with the origins of the ancient games, their ideals and practices, the place of women (largely absent), and several issues that have long fascinated students of classical athletics, such as how accurate were the lists of winners (not very), who were the judges (they were all drawn from Elis, the host city state), who were the losers (although the ancients had no equivalent to the silver medal, so that athletes prayed ‘for the wreath or death,’ the late Victor Matthews convincingly argues that there is more information available on the losers than was previously understood), and how did the athletes actually perform the long jump with halteres, the hand weights depicted in vase paintings of the event (Hugh Lee concludes from the recent scholarship that the jump began with a run). Many of the papers require knowledge of the classical scholarship to follow the argument in detail, but they are all well summarized for the general reader. Most helpful are two overviews by Nigel Crowther, who shows that none of the modern Coubertin ideals of peace and international understanding were associated with ancient games. On the contrary, the ancient games were never cancelled because of war, even with conflict raging a few hundred kilometres away, city states sought the advice of the seer at Olympia before going into battle, and successful armies offered their arms in thanksgiving to the temple of Zeus at Olympia, even if the victories were won at the expense of fellow Greeks.

While the second section on the modern Olympics is more synthetic, with several discussions of what is now familiar scholarship, there are strong research papers on the origins of the Olympic torch relay (Robert Barney and Anthony Bijkerk argue that Carl Diem’s inspiration for the first relay in 1936 came from the installation of a caldron and flame in the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam in 1928), the financial transformation of the International Olympic Committee under Juan Antonio Samaranch (by Wenn and Scott Martyn), and the politics of the forgotten Olympiad for the Physically Disabled in Toronto in 1976, one of the forerunners to the Paralympic Games (by David Greig). The organizers of the Olympiad repeatedly refused to honour the international moratorium against apartheid sport, and went ahead and invited disabled athletes from South Africa, at the cost of federal financial support. Greig argues that the dispute, which he dismisses as ‘splitting hairs,’ enabled them to raise funds elsewhere, bringing the games much wider support than might have otherwise obtained. In a concluding essay, Mark Dyerson ponders the very future of the modern games, suggesting that, like world fairs, the original nineteenth-century attempt to bring the world together and one of Coubertin’s inspirations, the Olympics may soon be marginalized by global television and the growing popularity of extreme sports and Survivor formats. Tracking that trajectory, too, will require critical, historically grounded research, of which this collection is an important example.