The First Olympics, Revisited

In this episode, we revisit a podcast on the first Olympics. The first Olympics featured familiar events, but also some lethal exhibitions. Married women were barred from watching the games, but victors could sometimes expect to receive meals for life.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm de bline A. Charcoal Boarding
and to Blind at the Olympic are almost upon us,
and we're gonna be celebrating here at the podcast too

(00:22):
with a few fun new sporting episode. Yes, and apparently
we're do because we don't have too many sporting episodes.
We did kind of a review of our catalog and
didn't find too much. Yeah, so we were disappointed in that,
and we're going to try to rectify the situation a
little bit by having some cool sports episodes to get
everyone excited about the events. And uh, we've already got

(00:44):
one lined up on the wild nineteen hundred Paras Olympics,
which featured everything from tug of war competitions to swimming
races in the sun. So that's something to look forward to.
It will be a fun one for sure. But since
that Paris episode does cover a lot on the founding
of the modern Olympics, we thought it might help to
revisit a topic from the stuffy Miston History Class archives,

(01:07):
an episode on the First Olympics, which took place back
in seven in ancient Greece, the first Olympics, not the
episode we haven't been recording for that long, right, that
was back in two thousand eight, and former host Candice
and Josh talked about the unsporting ancient tradition of throwing
married women's spectators off the top of a mountain for

(01:29):
a daring peak at the events. So not a very
pleasant experience if you were a married woman, and the
games themselves were just as violent. There were wrestling and
boxing events that were very popular. They were used boxing
gloves that were essentially just bands that were wrapped around
the fighter's fists. They really just did more damage. They
bloody your opponent up more than protect your hands and

(01:50):
protect your opponent's faith. And there was also this sort
of wrestling boxing hybrid, which, according to Greek mythology, was
invented by to hear a theseus to fight the minotaur.
There were also equestrian events like chariot races and um,
you know, things that seem a little more traditional today
to including foot races of different lengths, the long jump,
the disc is throw, the pentathlon, um. And then victors too.

(02:13):
They didn't just get the gold medal the silver medal
or the bronze. They could get all sorts of trophies,
ranging from cauldrons to olive oil to free meals for life.
That one sounds pretty good. Repeat champions who won more
than three events would even get statues placed in the
Temple of Zeus at Olympia in their honor, so that
was really the ultimate goal, lifelong honor in respect. So

(02:37):
the lineup for the modern Games has of course changed
pretty drastically, as has the admissions policies as well. Hear
more about soon on Candics and Josh's podcast. But one
ancient tradition that was clearly embraced by Pierre Baron de Coupiton,
founder of the modern Games, is goodwill. The ancient Games
were meant to show off the strength of athletic citizens,

(02:58):
but also to bring Greek together for a peaceful event.
In fact, to guarantee safety of the delegations traveling through
sometimes hostile territory, an Olympic truce was necessary, and Josh
talks a little bit more about this coming up in
a second. The city state of Uless, which came up
with the idea in the ninth century, would send out
heralds before the games began and they would declare that

(03:21):
truth truce was in effect and that all participants should
have safe passage. And I think that's interesting to compare
that idea of the ancient truths for the athletes to
Kubatom's idea that quote, in order to respect one another,
it is first necessary to know one another through sport.
And I think that's still an idea that holds true today,
at least in the most idealistic sense of the Olympic.

(03:43):
Sure it's entertaining, but it should bring us together and
let us all enjoy watching people compete at the highest level.
So well said. On that note, let's take a listen
to the old podcast Get out your Popcorn Deablina. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined

(04:05):
day by staff writer Joshua m Clark. How's it going,
josh It's going well, Candice. How are you as always? So, Candice,
I know you and your fiance still love to run marathons. Right,
so you watch the Olympics. Are you excited about the
Olympics coming? Well, okay, I have a question for you
today about some of the early Olympics. The first Olympics,
UM the first recorded Olympics was what Okay, but there's

(04:29):
evidence that it goes back, you know, two and fifty
years before that to like Greek god times when Zoos
battled it out and became king of the gods because
he won an Olympic conventant and and most of the
evidence we have is just legend, and we've had to
discern you know, what happened originally from just looking at
pottery basically, right, and a couple of poems written by

(04:51):
people like Pliny the Elder, right, Okay, But but ultimately, um,
we we know that all of these legends, all these descriptions,
I'll go back to the Olympics being started as a
tribute to Zeus, the god of gods, on Mount Olympus, right, Okay, Well,
so with the Olympics. Originally, um, it was a one
day event and it was actually just a single event,

(05:14):
the Stadion race, okay, which is them running six feet
and it was one day. I can't imagine that took
very long to to to hold that event. But um,
ultimately it caught on in such popularity that all these
generally warring city states that neighbored one another, um would

(05:34):
take on an Olympic troops during the Olympics and all
fighting would stop, all feuds would be off, so that
these UM Olympic athletes could come into Olympus where they
held the Olympics. Right, logically enough, UM and UM compete
for that one day, so they took it pretty seriously.
Right now, I've UM, I've read your article pretty thoroughly

(05:56):
and I loved it on how how the first Olympics works,
But I noticed that it was very male centric there.
There wasn't too much talk about women, and I had
heard that UM women actually were very much discouraged from,
you know, even watching the Olympics, that they could be
killed for doing so. Is that factors that fiction? Can
you clear that up? That's actually a fact. Young virgins

(06:18):
could watch the Olympic event, but married women absolutely were forbidden,
and the punishment for sneaking in and watching the games
was actually death. Women were hurled off the pinnacle of
Mount type Hangan, which stands about four ninety ft high.
And there's actually a pretty famous legend about Calliptera, who
trained her son to compete in the Olympics, and she

(06:39):
herself came from a long line of Olympic victors. And
she snuck in. She was determined to watch her son compete,
and when he won, she was so excited that she
ran forward to congratulate him, and her clothes were ripped
off of her in the process, and obviously it was
revealed that she was a woman, but because again she
had such Olympic route, they decided to pardon her. And

(07:00):
there's actually no archaeological evidence that anyone was thrown off
the mountain. I guess they were looking for bones at
the base of Tapaan and they couldn't find them, but
women pretty much stayed away. They learned their last time.
Would do it for me? It's yeah, pretty high. And
also toward the eighth century, a lot of the athletes
started competing naked. And maybe that's just for a momentum

(07:20):
or or you know, less traction when they were running,
but also it could have been an effort to discern
whether the competitors were men or women competing in disguise.
I imagine it just felt good. Yeah, you know, I
get the breeze in there. Well, that was a fun
one to revisit and get us pumped up for the
upcoming games and the upcoming podcast. Yeah, Olympics exactly. And

(07:42):
if you want to learn a little bit more about
the First Olympics, the very first Olympics, Candice has an
excellent article on our website. UM it's called how the
First Olympics Worked appropriately enough and you can look that
up by visiting our home page www. Dot Have stuff
works dot com mm hmm for more on this and

(08:06):
thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot
com m