Olympics Journey: A Blog on Culture and Social History

The Olympics is the largest, most global, highest standard for athleticism. But since when? The Olympics started all the way back in 776 BC in Greece. But this was not the Olympics that we know today in 2024. People would perform in the nude. They would fight to the death. And it was all done in the name of pagan gods. It was a tradition that would supersede the political situations.

So they would set aside war and political strife to come together to do these games in honor of these pagan gods. But in 393 AD, when a Christian ruler came in, he banned all pagan practices, including the Olympics. From then all the way until the 19th century, the Olympics was essentially dead. This was until a man by the name Pierre de Coubertin came along. He was a French man who really loved sportsmanship. And he believed in the spirit of the Olympics in the sense of pure sportsmanship and working to become our best. He laid this out in what later became the Olympic creed, which reads: “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.” So with this idealized image of what the Olympics could be, Kubertine set out to create the International Olympic Committee.

And this was founded in 1894. And then only two years later, the first ever modern Olympic Games was held. The 1896 Olympics were held in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, Greece. It’s a stadium that’s built entirely of marble. And it was built actually sixth century BC. So there really wasn’t a better place to revive the Olympics than right there in Athens. Then it was in 1912 that Cooper teen designed the Olympic rings that we know and love today. Each ring is supposed to symbolize an inhabited continent, the Americas counting as one for some reason. And the colors are chosen because at the time every flag in the world had at least one color represented in the rings.

So it really was supposed to be this message of world unity and everyone coming together to better themselves through sportsmanship. When the International Olympic Committee was created, they had a million decisions to make. They decide: Are we only going to allow the same games that were played in ancient Olympics? Where are we going to hold these Olympics? How often are we going to hold them? Who’s allowed to participate? It was just a whole list of things to be decided. Thankfully, their ideals and the spirit of unity shone through a bit. And as early as 1900, women athletes and black athletes were allowed to participate in the games. In the 1960s, the Paralympics were created for athletes with disabilities. And as recent as 2016, a refugee team was created for those athletes who are also.

Refugees another way to push this agenda. Of unity and sportsmanship was to not allow professional athletes to play so it wasn’t even until 1986 that professional athletes were allowed to perform in the games at the Olympics. In fact there was a early medallist in the 1912 Olympics who won tons of gold medals. His name was Jim Thorpe. He was actually stripped of all of his medals after the Olympics because it turned out that he played professional baseball. So did everyone else at the games but he just didn’t lie about it.

He went on to create a little club of his own where professional athletes could play the NFL. While the games themselves are really inclusive the events and the organization has been used to push political propaganda for better or for worse. And this is what’s so fascinating to me is that learning the history of the Olympics can often tell a much larger story of what was happening in the world at the time. So here are a couple examples of that. In 1936 the Olympics were held in Berlin which was Nazi Germany at the time. Hitler wanted to use the games to perpetuate his ideas of a superior race.

This backfired a bit when Jesse Owens a black US athlete won four gold medals for his running and all Hitler could do in response was refused to shake his hand. Only 20 years after World War II in 1964 the olympics were held in Japan. This marked Japan’s emergence from the war as not an enemy but a peaceful country. Then in 1968 during the Mexico Olympics two runners Tommy Smith and John Carlos protested against racial violence in America leading to their suspension from the US team. They say the games are sports not politics something separate and apart from the realities of life. But the black athlete says that he wants.  

Equality everywhere, not just within the arena. He says that he will not be used once every four years on behalf of a group that ignores what happens to him every day of all the years.  In 1980, during the Cold War, the US hockey team and the Soviet Union hockey team went head to head in an event that Sports Illustrated called the top sports moment of the 20th century. And the last example I’ll give is that only six months after the horrible 9/11 attacks in New York, the Salt Lake City Olympics signified a resilient nation that could overcome fear and safely gather together again.

Because of the platform that the Olympics has and because of its dense, complex history, it’s really worth looking into the history of the Olympics. If you are in an Olympic city, the modern Olympics has been held in 43 different cities across five different continents. And this is all due to Pierre de Coubertin and his ability to gather people together to create the Olympic committee and his vision of what the Olympics could be.