Episode #209- What Are the Olympic Myths? (Part III)

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I want to tell you a story about a runner.

Now you may have heard this one before because this is perhaps the most famous story about a runner that has ever been told.

This is the tale of the first ever marathon.

The story goes that in the year 490 BC, an army of Greeks led by the city of Athens made a stand against a massive Persian invasion force at the plains of Marathon, some 40 kilometers northeast of Athens.

The Athenians and their allies were hugely outnumbered by the Persians, perhaps three to one.

Some less reliable sources even claim that the Persian army numbered 100,000 men compared to the 10,000 fielded by the Greeks.

While that's unlikely, all the sources agree that the Greeks were at a disadvantage.

And yet, despite the long odds, the Athenians won the day.

The Persians were pushed back, and the first attempted Persian invasion of Greece was blunted.

Legend has it that as it became clear that the Greeks were going to win, a runner was sent from Marathon back to Athens to deliver the happy news.

This runner covered that 40-kilometer distance at an impressive speed, but the exertion proved to be more than any mortal could handle.

When he finally arrived in Athens, he collapsed in front of the city leaders, and with his last breath, he breathed the word, Nikomen, we have won.

And then the valiant messenger promptly died from exhaustion.

The marathon had claimed its first happy victim.

Now, that last word is somewhat contested.

Others have translated it as, quote, joy to you, we have won, end quote, with the runner repeating the last word, joy, as he finally expired.

But as it turns out, it's not just the last words that are a little inconsistent between the sources.

There's actually some disagreement over the name of this famous first marathoner.

The best-known tradition has it that the runner was named Phydipides, but another source calls him Philippides.

And then a third source offers us two different names for the runner, calling him both Thersippus and Eucles.

So,

which one is it?

Well, here's the thing about the story of the Marathon run.

The whole thing is probably fake history.

The earliest source we have on the Battle of Marathon and the Persian Wars in general is our old buddy Herodotus, father of history, father of lies.

As we've mentioned many times before on this podcast, the writings of Herodotus are widely acknowledged as the first works of narrative history in what was later understood as the quote-unquote Western tradition.

His book on the Persian Wars set the template for centuries of history writing that would follow him.

The other wonderful thing about Herodotus is that he was a storyteller.

that loved to spice up his historical accounts with rumors, legends, and wild tales that, while entertaining, probably were not true.

Hence the moniker, father of history, father of lies.

Herodotus is indeed the first source we have for the story of the runner Phydipides.

But interestingly, in that version of things, Phydipides did not make a fatal run from Marathon to Athens.

According to Herodotus, Phydipides was was tasked with running all the way from Athens to Sparta to hopefully secure Spartan support for the upcoming battle with the Persians.

We're told that Phydipides managed to cover this enormous 250-kilometer run in around a day and a half or 36 hours.

Not only did this not kill him, Herodotus makes a point of saying that these massive runs were fairly typical for a guy like Phydipides.

His job was literally to run between Greek cities delivering messages.

Instead, Herodotus tells us that the greatest challenge faced by Phydipides came from the god Pan.

That's Greece's goatlegged god of the woods.

Pan was annoyed that the Athenians had become less enthusiastic in their sacrifices, after he had been so good to them over the years.

So, apparently when Phydipides returned to Athens and told them of Pan's displeasure, they agreed that they would build a new shrine to him on the Acropolis.

This act of piety apparently convinced Pan to help the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon.

One of the gods' powers was to incite fear and confusion, hence the English word panic.

According to some of our more romantic sources, the panic that swept through the Persians near the the end of that battle was all thanks to the Athenians getting right with Pan.

We're told that Phydipides arrived in Sparta healthy and with enough breath to deliver a fairly long and complex message about Athenian battle plans.

Now, the only bummer was that while the Spartans agreed to help, they claimed that their religious obligations insisted that they could not put an army in the field until the next full moon.

That meant that they were going to miss the battle.

Oh, we'd love to help, but sadly, we just won't be able to make it because, you know, the gods.

So, once again, we get a great story from Herodotus.

But, notably, he says nothing about Phydipides or any other runner going from Marathon to Athens to deliver a message of victory.

The first time that story appears in writing is some 500 years later in the work of the Roman era historian Plutarch.

In his book On the Glory of Athens, Plutarch tells the tale of a breathless runner delivering the news of victory from Marathon to the leaders of Athens.

Except Plutarch calls this man both Thersippus and Eucles.

The combined tale of a run to Sparta and then a subsequent run from Marathon to Athens finally appears in writing a century after Plutarch, in the writings of the Roman author Lucian.

It's in Lucian that we get the story that we've come to know, with the runner squeaking out his famous last words and then dying at the feet of Athens' city fathers.

So that's a remarkable 600 years between the actual battle of Marathon and the version of the Marathon story that's become most beloved.

As longtime listeners know, the later a story appears in the sources, the less likely it is to be true.

This is all to say that the story of the marathon runner is a textbook example of a historical myth.

It seems only fitting, then, that the first modern marathon was run as the signature event at the first modern Olympics.

The revived Olympics were entirely based on a romantic and frankly inaccurate understanding of the ancient Greek past.

The modern marathon was designed to reenact a run that almost certainly never happened.

Once it was decided that the first modern Olympic Games would be hosted in Athens in 1896, the organizers took as many opportunities as they could to evoke the city's classical past.

Interestingly enough, it was a Frenchman, Michel Brielle, who first proposed the idea of a race from the plains of Marathon to the newly renovated pan-Athenic stadium in the Greek capital.

The president of the IOC and the main force behind the revived Olympics, the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, loved the idea.

Both Brielle and de Coubertin were familiar with the story of Marathon from the art of Luc Olivier Merson, whose 1869 painting of the Battle of Marathon depicted the collapsing Phydipides.

Both men were also quite familiar with the 1879 poem about Phydipides by the English poet Robert Browning.

Browning's poem essentially combined the accounts found in both Herodotus and Lucian, creating the most dramatic version of events possible.

In many ways, the marathon that the IOC sought to recreate at the 1896 Olympic Games was Robert Browning's marathon.

And yet, there was something about that particular historical myth that seemed to resonate with the Greek public.

Hosting this experimental new international athletic competition had been somewhat politically divisive in the country.

The costs associated with the event were considerable.

Many Greeks also viewed the nascent International Olympic Committee and its president, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, with suspicion.

What right did these French fellows have to even use the name Olympics?

Was this just another example of Western Europeans plundering Greece's heritage for their own amusement?

Were the modern Olympics just the Elgin marbles all over again?

It took the influence of the Greek royal family to get the Athens Games the support they needed to happen at all.

Sensing that a successful Olympic Games could be a positive thing for Greece's global standing, not to mention a propaganda victory for the still shaky Greek monarchy, Crown Prince Constantine and Prince George became vocal supporters of the Athens Games.

Even though these games ran fairly smoothly, Greek skepticism did not entirely disappear.

That was until the marathon.

Along with the discus throw, the marathon was the event most associated with Greece's ancient history.

It had also been a hit to Greek pride when an American athlete, Thomas Burke, had triumphed in the discus.

So many Greeks had pinned their hopes on the marathon.

The 1896 race started on the plains of Marathon and wound down rudimentary dirt roads to Athens, finally terminating in the Pan-Athenic Stadium.

I'm sure you can imagine how that place erupted when the first runner who entered the stadium after racing an unprecedented 40 kilometers was a Greek.

Spyridon Luis, a 26-year-old former soldier who sold mineral water on the streets of Athens with his father, was the undisputed winner of the world's first Olympic marathon.

It's hard to overstate just how exciting this was for the Greek crowd.

We're told that when a Greek entered the Olympic stadium, the overjoyed Greek princes, Constantine and George, both ran out of their seats and joined Spyridon for the victory lap.

The pandemonium became even more intense when it became clear that the second and third place runners were also Greek.

Now, that third place runner would eventually be disqualified when it was discovered that he had rode part of the way in a horse-drawn cart.

But in the moment, no one knew that.

It simply looked like the Greeks had dominated the most Greek of races.

One eyewitness glowed that, quote, the whole scene can never be effaced from one's memory.

Such was the scene unsurpassed and unsurpassable.

Who, who was present who does not wish that he may once again be permitted to behold it?

End quote.

Another exclaimed, Egad, the excitement and the enthusiasm were simply indescribable.

Writing years later, Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin wistfully recalled of Spiridon Louis's victory, quote,

At his entry into the stadium, it seemed that all of Greek antiquity entered with him.

Cheers went up, such as have never been heard before.

This was one of the most extraordinary spectacles of which I have any memory.

End quote.

Ah,

of Greek antiquity ran in with him.

You can always rely on de Coubertin to bring it all back to the historical myth.

As I've said before in this series, the International Olympic Committee are suckers for historical symmetry.

To have a Greek man win the first marathon in emulation of the ancient Greek runner Phydipides, oh,

that is IOC catnip.

Anyone trying to pedantically point out that the original marathon story was likely a myth would not have found many receptive ears in Athens in 1896.

The Greek success in the first marathon was intoxicating even for non-Greeks.

As a story, it was just too good.

The jubilation that accompanied the end of the first marathon seemed to carry over to the rest of the games.

After that, the Greeks were convinced that the games had been a roaring success.

The king of Greece even started advocating against moving the games to a new host city every four years.

After the success of 1896, he wanted the Olympics to remain in Greece.

The king would not ultimately have his wish, but the success of the marathon and the enthusiasm of the Greek crowds essentially ensured that the Olympics would happen again.

You could argue that the successful use of a historical myth helped make the Olympics into more than just a late 19th century curiosity.

You could say that the marathon myth helped the Olympics go the distance.

That might be a little too cheesy.

But can you be too cheesy when it comes to the Olympics?

Isn't enjoying the Olympics about embracing the cheese?

The 1896 Olympics were just successful enough to ensure that the International Olympic Committee would get a few more chances to make the fledgling event into something with over a century's worth of staying power.

But there was still a weird road to be traversed before the world fully embraced the Olympics.

Just how weird was that road?

Let's find out today on our fake history.

Episode number 209, What Are the Olympic Myths?

Part 3.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

Before we get going this week, I just want to remind everyone that an ad-free version of this podcast is available through Patreon.

Just go to patreon.com slash our fake history and start supporting at $5 or more every month to get access to an ad-free feed and hours of exclusive extras.

This episode, you are hearing right now, is the final episode of season nine.

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it kind of blows my mind a little bit.

Anyway, after this one drops, we are going to be taking a short four-week break before returning in early September 2024 with the start of season 10.

Over those four weeks, I'm going to be dropping weekly throwback episodes to keep the feed warm.

But if you sense that you're going to miss the new episodes, then perhaps it's a good time for you to get yourself on Patreon.

There you will find all sorts of cool extra episodes.

We're talking shows on Nicola Tesla, El Dorado, Merlin, and a long list of other cool topics.

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Start supporting your favorite podcast and make sure your next month is filled with good stuff to listen to.

This week, we are wrapping up our three-part series on the history of the Olympics.

As I'm sure you've already put together, this is part three of three.

So, if you've not heard the first two parts, then I would strongly suggest that you go back and give those shows a listen.

In those first two parts, we spent some time examining the ancient Olympic Games that were held for over a millennia at the sanctuary of Olympia in Greece's Peloponnesian Peninsula.

The goal was to show how the real ancient Olympics compared to the romantic vision of the ancient games that was promoted by the men who revived the Olympics in the late 1800s.

What we saw was that the ancient games were messy, political, and violent.

In many ways, the modern games are most like the ancient games when they are at their most scandalous.

The sportsmanlike idealism that can elevate the modern games in the best moments would have seemed quite foreign to the ancient Greeks.

We spent some time exploring all the mythology and fake history that surrounded the ancient games, including the foundation myths involving the heroes Heracles and Pelops.

We also explored some of the wilder stories about the athletes at the ancient games, including the Pancration wrestler Arhykion, who allegedly used his last living breath to land a devastating blow and win his event.

Finally, we took a tour through the world of ancient cheating scandals, magical performance enhancers, and corrupt ancient officials, culminating in the dubious tales of Emperor Nero cheating at the games.

But now that we have thoroughly explored the ancient Olympics, I thought we should turn our attention towards the modern games.

So, in this final installment, I want to explore exactly where the so-called Olympic idea of reviving the ancient games came from.

Then, in honor of the current Olympic moment, the 2024 Games in Paris, I want to explore the very first Paris Olympics, which took place in the year 1900.

Not only does this fit with the whole historical symmetry theme that I've been trying to weave through the series, the 1900 games were arguably the weirdest and least Olympic the Games would ever be.

I think it's worth exploring those first Paris games as a test case for what happens when you take the fake ancient history out of the Olympics.

If you're not pretending that you're reviving something ancient, are you even doing the Olympics?

I'll let you be the judge.

Now, one figure who's been floating through this entire series, popping his head in and out as needed, is the man who often gets credit for reviving the Olympics in the modern era.

That's the French aristocrat, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

Now, I've been arguing throughout this series that our mythical misunderstanding of the ancient Olympics is largely thanks to de Coubertin's romantic framing of the games.

It turns out that the early history of the Olympic revival, as told by Pierre de Coubertin, is equally romantic and unreliable.

Now, I don't mean to give the impression that Pierre de Coubertin was a nefarious figure, because I don't think he was.

In many ways, he was an idealist and an incurable optimist.

He was a sincere champion of peace and international cooperation, even at a time when those ideals seemed deeply out of step with the global mood.

But de Coubertaire was a propagandist at heart.

He was an Olympic booster who was not overly concerned with historical accuracy.

History, and by extension, historical myths, were tools to be employed in service of promoting the revived Olympics and the values that he hoped they would stand for.

It should probably then come as no surprise that Pierre de Coubertin was also a fairly shameless booster of Pierre de Coubertin.

When he got the opportunity to write the history of how the Olympics were revived, he presented the story in a way that made him look like a lone genius.

The only man in nearly two millennia who saw the value in the ancient Olympics.

In 1908, de Coubertin published a memoir, which Olympic historian David Goldblatt has called, quote, fantastically unreliable, end quote.

In it, de Coubertin presents himself as a lifelong hellenophile, that is, a lover of all things Greek.

But the French Baron gets cagey when it comes to the topic of exactly when and how he came to the idea of reviving the ancient games.

De Coubertin writes, quote,

when and how the need associated itself in my mind with the idea of re-establishing the Olympic Games, I couldn't say.

I was familiar with the term Olympics.

Nothing in ancient history made me more of a dreamer than Olympia.

This city of dream raised its colonnades and porticos unceasingly before my adolescent mind.

Long before I I thought of drawing from its ruins a principle of revival, I would rebuild it in my mind and make the shape of its silhouette live again.

End quote.

So, if we trust de Coubertin, then he had been dreaming of ancient Olympia since he was a teenager.

But Olympic historians, David Goldblatt and David Young, are both deeply suspicious of this claim.

In fact, before the 1890s, there's almost no evidence to be found that de Coubertin was especially interested in Olympia or ancient Greece in general.

Goldblatt, in particular, argues that this lifelong love of ancient Greece was a retcon that de Coubertin placed in his own memoir.

That's retroactive continuity for those of you who aren't comic book heads.

Young and Goldblatt both believe that de Coubertin came fairly late to the idea of a modern Olympics.

This was not something that he had been dreaming about since boyhood.

This was an idea that he borrowed from other people who had been hosting Olympic-themed festivities for many decades before the first Athens Games in 1896 and the establishment of the International Olympic Committee.

But these people and their their pre-Olympics were conveniently left out of de Coubertin's memoir.

It's just a cleaner story if one dreamy French child in love with the tales of ancient Greece came up with the whole thing by himself.

So, how original was the idea of a revived Olympics?

What were these games before the games?

Well, let's dig into it.

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Baron Pierre de Coubertin was born in Paris in 1863, the son of a wealthy and well-positioned French aristocrat.

His early life was deeply affected by his country's humiliating loss to Prussia in the short but devastating Franco-Prussian War.

This conflict famously culminated in the creation of a united Germany, declared in the occupied Palace of Versailles.

Now, there were many reasons why the Prussians had been so successful in this war, but de Coubertin became convinced that one of the deciding factors had to do with the physical fitness of the French soldiers.

The Prussians had incorporated a newly developed German system of gymnastics known as Turnin into the general education of their youth and their military training.

De Coubertin believed that France was falling behind when it came to physical education, so much so that it had lost them a war.

Now, as an aristocrat, de Coubertin had the freedom to try out a number of different career paths.

But he eventually became a sort of public intellectual and a campaigner for educational reform.

As a young adult, it seems like his passion was not ancient Greece so much as it was modern Britain.

Yes, Pierre de Coubertin was the rarest of things.

A French anglophile.

And they famously do not make too many of those.

But de Coubertin's understanding of England was perhaps just as romantic as his understanding of Olympia.

As a young man, he read the novel Tom Brown's School Days by the English author Thomas Hughes.

The late 19th century bestseller was inspired by the author's own time at England's prestigious rugby school.

De Coubertin fell in love with this novel, and by extension, a version of the English public school experience with all the hard edges sanded off and the straight-up abuse edited out.

As a young man, de Coubertin even toured through rugby, Eton, and a handful of other prestigious English schools.

And he took with him his copy of Tom Brown's School Days, specifically so he could imagine the scenes in the book playing out before his eyes while he was at these famous schools.

The thing he admired most about the English style of education was the robust inclusion of sports in school life.

And this became an essential part of both his educational philosophy and his understanding of sports in general.

The type of sporting culture that he wanted exported to France and then eventually made international by way of the revived Olympics, was a distinctively British style of sports.

This came with posh manners, an emphasis on fair play, and also a dedication to amateurism, which, as we explored in the last episode, effectively ensured that the quote-unquote lower orders were kept out of elite competition.

De Coubertin's early writing has very little in it about ancient Greece.

Instead, it's filled with praise for the English sporting life and then later the American collegiate sports tradition.

By all accounts, that's what he was really passionate about.

So, where did all this ancient Greek stuff come in?

Well, as Olympic historians Young and Goldblatt have pointed out, the Olympic idea of a revived games had been banging around Europe since at least the 1830s.

The origin, appropriately, seems to have been in Greece.

Historian David Young credits the Greek poet Panegiotis Sutsos with first articulating the quote-unquote Olympic idea.

In 1833, Greece had just reclaimed its independence from the slowly crumbling Ottoman Empire.

Sutsos was among a group of patriotic Greek artists and intellectuals attempting to articulate the spirit of the newly independent Greek nation.

For Tsutsos, part of this was reckoning with Greece's ancient past, which was both a source of pride and a type of bitter nostalgia for a golden age many Greeks worried may never return.

In his epic 1833 poem, Dialogue of the Dead, Sutsos imagined the ancient philosopher Plato looking woefully at modern Greece from the underworld and lamenting, quote, Where are your Olympic games, your great festivals, your great theaters, the marble statues?

Where are they?

End quote.

This somewhat offhanded line in a 14-page poem lingered with Tsuzos, who soon started arguing that a revived Olympics would be emblematic of a revived Greek nation.

In 1835, Tsutsos went so far as to petition the government to both make March 25th, the traditionally accepted start date of the Greek War of Independence, a national holiday and to bring back the Olympic Games.

The idea of a revived Olympic Games had some support in the Greek government, but a bureaucratic turnover meant that only the proposal for a new holiday was ultimately accepted.

But the idea lingered.

In 1837, the Greek king passed a law calling for a revived Olympic Games.

But no action was taken on the matter for nearly two decades, despite constant public pleas from Sutsos.

Eventually, in 1859, after financial support was secured from the Greek millionaire Evangelis Zappas, a revived Olympic Games took place in Athens.

These are commonly known as the Zapas Olympics.

These revived Olympics were only open to Greeks, be they Greek nationals or ethnic Greeks still living in the Ottoman Empire.

They featured an athletic program very close to the ancient games, minus the chariot racing, and including pole climbing.

which 19th century Greeks seem to have been especially enthusiastic about.

The games were considered a reasonable success, although they remained little commented on outside of Greece.

Still, they were successful enough that they were brought back in 1870 and then again in 1875.

So, we have to ask: were the Zapas Olympics actually the first modern Olympics?

There's a strong case to be made.

However, the Greeks may have been beaten to the punch of Olympic revival by a fairly obscure English village in the West Midlands.

The modern Olympics may have started in the most unlikely of places.

The village of Much Wenlock in Shropshire started holding their own Olympic Games in 1850, a a solid nine years before the first Zappas Games.

These Olympics came about thanks to a civic-minded doctor named William Penny Brooks, who was determined to make his little village of Much Wenlock the best damn village in all of England.

As the town's leading citizen, Dr.

Brooks took a deep interest in providing opportunities for the betterment of the town's rural working class.

To this end, he set up programs to help improve literacy among Shropshire's farmers.

He also established a yearly set of competitions largely focused on track and field events meant to inspire the good people of Much Wenlock to stay fit.

Now, Dr.

Brooks was a proper Hellenophile.

The standard British education of the day for the upper crust had lots of focus on classical antiquity.

This meant that most well-to-do Brits were quite conversant in ancient Roman and Greek history, literature, and mythology.

But Dr.

Brooks really fell in love with all of it.

So when he founded his yearly athletic festival in 1850, he dubbed it the annual Wenlock Olympic Games.

This was sort of a mashup of a country fair and a regional track meet.

But significantly, it came with a healthy dose of pageantry inspired by the ancient games at Olympia.

There were elaborate opening ceremonies that featured a parade of athletes.

Greek letters and other insignia were a big part of the decoration.

Wreath crowns were given to the victors, modeled on those used at Olympia, as described by the ancient authors.

The events at the much Wenlock Olympics really underscore how it was meant to be a family-friendly day at the park.

Not only were there all the expected running and jumping events, but there was also cricket, football, and a game called quoitz, which is kind of like horseshoes, but the organizers claimed that it was done in honor of the ancient discus throw.

Sure, quits.

Many of the events at the Wenlock Olympics were designed specifically for children.

There was a potato sack race and a one-legged race.

There was a spelling bee, a history competition, and knitting events.

After 1858, the signature event at the Games became a faux medieval tilt at a ring.

That is, riding on horseback with a lance and trying to knock a ring out of place.

This medieval-themed event kind of broke with the whole ancient Greece theme of the thing, but being relentlessly on theme was never the vibe of the Much Wenlock Olympics.

Now, amazingly, these games are still going on.

They happen every July.

And honestly, I kind of want to go.

Maybe we could organize an Hour Fake History meetup at the Much Wenlock Games.

Who's with me?

Let me know.

Anyway, the Much Winlock Games probably would have remained a charming Midlands curiosity, barely noticed outside of Shropshire, had they not been quietly influential.

You see, Dr.

Brooks became one of Pierre de Coubertin's favorite English thinkers when it came to physical education and the role of sports.

In 1889, de Coubertin, who had been using his upper-class connections to start correspondences with leading English educational thinkers, was put in contact with William Brooks.

The two struck up a fairly lively correspondence, during which Brooks sent de Coubertin programs and other materials associated with the Much Wenlock Olympics.

Brooks then invited de Coubertin to come to Shropshire as his guest.

The French baron took him up on this offer and arrived in Much Wenlock in October of 1890.

Despite the fact that the annual games had already happened, Brooks organized a special autumn edition of the Olympics specifically so de Coubertin could see them for himself.

Historian David Young has quite convincingly demonstrated that de Coubertin got the Olympic idea directly from from Dr.

Brooks.

The Baron even commented in 1890 that, quote, clearly, Dr.

Brooks, more keenly than any other, has sensed the mysterious influence in which Greek civilization across the ages still exerts on humanity, end quote.

It seems like this trip to Shropshire convinced de Coubertin that the Olympics were a useful idea.

That ancient Greek festival was a useful theme around which an international competition could be organized.

Now, I think this is part of the reason why the modern interpretation of the ancient games is so muddled.

De Coubertin got interested in the Olympics by way of an Englishman.

He was interpreting someone else's enthusiasm for ancient Greek athletics, mixed as they were with ideas about medieval chivalry.

Now, for many years, de Coubertin would publicly give William Brooks credit for first reviving the Olympics in Shropshire.

But as the Olympics, as defined by the International Olympic Committee, became more established and de Coubertin became more of an international celebrity, his praise for Brooks became more rare, until it stopped altogether.

Once it became clear that the modern Olympics were going to last, de Coubertin seems to have wanted to take as much credit for them as possible.

By the time he was writing his memoir, he was saying that he couldn't really remember exactly how he got the idea to revive the Olympics.

But, you know, he had always been like super into ancient Greece, like always so into it, especially Olympia.

This is my thing, guys.

This was the Barons' fake history.

What's clear is that not long after witnessing the special autumn 1890 edition of the Much Wenlock Games, de Coubertin started calling for an international Olympic Games.

He started aggressively selling the quote-unquote Olympic idea that, by all accounts, had been floating around Greece and England for decades.

But de Coubertin presented it as novel, paired as it was with an insistence on peaceful international competition.

By 1894, the International Olympic Committee had been established at the Sorbonne, and Athens had been chosen for the site of the very first modern Olympiad, or at least the first modern Olympiad recognized by the IOC.

But despite the relative success of the 1896 Games in Athens, there was was still little guarantee that the Olympics would happen again.

After all, this was just one of many Olympic revivals that had happened over the course of the 19th century.

It was the fourth modern Olympics that had happened in Greece, albeit the first with international competitors.

So why was it that this version of the Olympics finally stuck?

In the first few years of the 20th century, it did not seem likely that the modern Olympics would last another 100 years.

In fact, the second modern Olympiad nearly killed the Olympic idea before it had a chance to properly take root.

So let's head to Paris in the year 1900 and see what went down.

Throughout this series, I've told the story of the first Olympics in Athens somewhat piecemeal.

In part one, we talked about the Sorbonne Conference and the choice of Athens as the venue for the first Games.

I also briefly discussed how the success of the Greek delegation at that conference was not entirely welcomed back in Greece.

This new Olympics was viewed by some as an expensive and potentially disastrous trifle, orchestrated by Frenchmen who had no right to use Greek heritage in their pageantry.

But as I mentioned in the introduction, the success of the 1896 Games, punctuated by the Greek victory in the marathon, completely changed the perception of the event.

The Greeks had caught Olympic fever.

There were many in the country who now believed that these Olympic games should indeed continue forever, just so long as they stayed in Greece.

Chief among those advocates was the King of Greece himself, who in the aftermath of 1896 issued a decree that all future Olympics should be held in his kingdom.

He proposed that the new Olympiad cycle should begin in 1898 and that new games should be held every four years starting from that point.

Now, this decree flew in the face of the still new International Olympic Committee.

They had envisioned a games that would move to a new host city every four years.

But this was the risk when you indulged in a little ancient Greek cosplay.

By claiming that your new international competition was, in fact, a revival of the ancient games at Olympia, there was always a a chance that real-life Greek people were going to have something to say about that.

In a way, the fake history of the games returned to bite the IOC.

A compromise was reached, whereby the IOC would recognize a Greek Games that happened in the years between the regularly scheduled Olympiads.

But this always frustrated de Kubeltan.

As it would turn out, a war with the Turks and other domestic issues in Greece meant that the second Athens Olympics, sometimes called the Intercollated Games, were not staged until 1906.

Years later, the IOC completely disavowed these 1906 games and no longer counts it as an official Olympic event.

This push and pull between Greece and the IOC over ownership of the Olympic brand may have been one of the reasons why de Coubertin started talking less about the legacy of the ancient games as the Olympic movement progressed.

It was a delicate dance.

On the one hand, associating the games with ancient Greece lent the competition gravitas and a sense of history.

On the other hand, if you were leaning too hard into the ancient Greece of it all, there would be those in the modern Greek nation who felt like they had a controlling interest in the fate of the games.

What was clear is that the first few modern Olympics after Athens were in need of some of that ancient gravitas.

Despite the relative success of the 1896 Games, the Olympics were still finding their feet.

In later years, cities would vie for the privilege of hosting the Games, but in 1900, no one was particularly interested in being the host of the Second Olympiad.

De Coubertin had always imagined Paris as the ideal city to host the Games.

But in 1900, Paris was already committed to another months-long international spectacle.

This was the Exposition Universelle, a massive world's fair meant to celebrate the technological and cultural achievements of the 19th century while welcoming in the 20th century.

But the undaunted de Coubertin believed that this could be an opportunity.

Paris was already going to be hosting the world at the expo.

The Olympics could easily slide in as the premier athletic attraction at the event.

Now, the scope of the 1900 Exposition Universelle was truly enormous.

Historians now consider this to be one of the high watermarks for the Gilded Age World Fairs.

It's been estimated that around 50 million people visited the fair over the months that it ran.

Paris built a number of iconic structures for the event that still exist today,

including the Grand Palais, the Alexander III Bridge, the Gare d'Orsay railroad station, and the Paris Metro line number one.

The exposition was also remembered for the debut of some truly epochal technological innovations, including the first ever regular passenger trolleybus line, escalators, diesel engines, electric cars, dry cell batteries, the first magnetic audio recorder, and the first ever talking films.

Yeah,

the 1900 Paris Expo was kind of a big deal.

And somewhere in the mix of this massive festival, de Coubertin thought that the Olympics could happen too.

So using his contacts in the French government and the French sporting body known as the USFSA, he was able to get approval to have the Olympics run as part of the Exposition Universelle.

However, by making the Olympics part of the expo, more chefs were invited into the kitchen.

The IOC lost control of their event.

The IOC was new and had little standing in the French sporting world in 1900.

So control was given over to the more established USFSA.

The French sporting body created an athletic program that Olympic historian Alan Gutman has called a, quote, disaster.

First, the new organizing committee dispensed with all the ancient Greek window dressing, deeming it to be out of step with the exposition's themes of French civilization and modern progress.

They didn't even use the name Olympics.

The competition was redubbed Le Concour International d'Exercis Physique et Despol,

which is a mouthful even in French.

The press of the day called the event all sorts of things, including the International Games and the Festival Games.

The whole thing ran over the course of five months, from May to October of 1900, and there were no opening or closing ceremonies.

Winners were not awarded with the traditional Greek wreaths that had been given out in Athens, nor were they given medals.

Most champions were given trophies and cups.

The result was the least Olympic Olympics in history, closely rivaled by the next Olympics, the 1904 Olympiad in St.

Louis.

In fact, the 1900 games were so completely overwhelmed by the Exposition Universelle that many of the athletes didn't even know that they were competing in the Olympics.

There was a famous story of an English rugby team, the Mosley Wanderers, who arrived in Paris, played, and then left all on the same day, only learning that they had competed in the Olympics after they returned to England.

Then other competitors who had been aware that the event was kind of the Olympics later learned that they had not competed in the Olympics after all because the IOC later deemed their event to be un-Olympic.

Yeah, it it got messy.

Now, this is my favorite thing about the first Paris Olympics, because you know I'm a sucker for anything weird.

And these games were weird.

Because the sporting events needed to be slotted into the commercial and industrial categories that were already decided on by the expo organizers, there were some very unusual choices.

The fencing and ice skating events were listed in the program program as subsets of the cutlery industry and were held in conjunction with demonstrations of the newest cooking knives.

Rowing was filed under life-saving.

Track and field clubs were curiously put with the

providential societies.

On top of that, the variety of sports contested at the 1900 games was pretty bananas, especially when compared to the more traditional 1896 games in Athens.

Popular team sports were now on the docket, like soccer, rugby, and cricket.

That was fair enough, but the Paris Games also included motorsports, 14 automobile races to be exact, including two events for taxis and two events for delivery vans.

Yeah, you could have been an Olympic delivery van driver.

There were fishing competitions, there was was pigeon racing.

We're talking trained birds.

There were also mass events open to all members of the public.

These included gymnastics and archery competitions that included literally thousands of participants.

There were life-saving competitions.

And because this was Paris at the turn of the century, there were balloon races.

As fans of this podcast know, there's nothing more belle epoch than ballooning.

You gotta open your heart to ballooning.

Even the more traditional events were a little odd.

Since the expo organizers were not particularly interested in ruining their parks with a proper running track, all the track events were held on grass.

The swimming events all took place in the waters of the Seine, which even in 1900 were kind of gross.

Swimming in a river also came with its own quirks.

All the races ran with the current, which propelled the swimmers to record-setting finishing times.

Australia's Frederick Lane was able to win the 200-meter freestyle with a current-assisted time that was 13 seconds faster than the world record.

13 seconds faster in the 200.

There was also a fascinating swimming obstacle course that involved clambering over metal bars and diving under the hulls of boats.

Even the marathon, which had been the highlight of the 1896 games, turned into a bit of a debacle.

First, the weather made the event downright dangerous.

It was an astounding 39 degrees Celsius that day.

That's 102 degrees Fahrenheit for my American listeners.

It was so hot that nearly half of the field dropped out of the race before it ended.

But more concerning were the accusations of cheating.

A number of American athletes later alleged that the marathon course, which wound its way through the streets of Paris, was designed so that the native Parisians might take advantage of shortcuts.

Sure enough, first and second place went to French athletes, both of whom lived in Paris.

One American, the steeplechase champion George Orton, would later write a magazine piece, claiming that at the end of the marathon, quote, the Frenchmen finished comparatively fresh, end quote.

He also noticed that the French runners seemed to be the only contestants who had finished the race without having been splattered with mud.

He wasn't alone in his suspicions.

The American marathoners Arthur Newton and Dick Grant had had taken an early lead in the race, and neither of them could recall ever being overtaken by their competitors.

They were shocked when they finished fifth and sixth, respectively.

If the American suspicions were correct, then the course for the 1900 Olympic Marathon was basically a Mario Kart track.

Despite American objections, the IOC ultimately upheld the results of the 1900 marathon.

In the end, the second Olympiad had barely been an Olympics.

The general attitude of the athletic world towards the event was perhaps best summed up by the Australian sprinter Stanley Rowley, who acidly commented, quote, to treat these events as world's championships would be really an insult to the important events they are supposed to be.

They're treated by most of the competitors as a huge joke, and when it comes to one who's come all this way from Australia to compete in them, it really seems ridiculous.

⁇ End quote.

Now, you got to remember that it took over a month to travel from Australia to France in 1900.

So I think we can understand Rowley's frustration.

It would take the retrospective gaze of the International Olympic Committee to ultimately determine which events had and had not been, quote-unquote, Olympic.

If you check the official Olympic website now, you'll discover that all of the motorsports and many of the more fanciful events were retrospectively deemed to be un-Olympic.

But, you know, the next time you hear someone grousing about how skateboarding and breakdancing are now Olympic events, just remind them that in 1900, the Olympics had pigeon racing.

In many ways, divorcing the 1900 games from the ancient Greek pageantry hurt their sense of importance.

Weirdly, the fake history made the event feel more real.

In a way, it's amazing that the modern Olympics survived the early 20th century.

The Paris Games were completely drowned out by the Expo Universelle.

The same could be said for the next Olympiad, the 1904 Games in St.

Louis.

Now, if there's a contender for an Olympics that's even stranger than the 1900 Paris Games, it would be St.

Louis.

Like the Paris Games, the 1904 Olympics were held in conjunction with a World's Fair, this time the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

Once again, the Olympic Games were shunted off to the side of this event.

Decoupeltin didn't even bother to attend, which put him in the company of the vast majority of European athletes.

Now, for a wonderful breakdown of the 1904 Games and the utterly bananas Olympic marathon from that year, then I will point you in the direction of the Constant podcast, A History of Getting Things Wrong, hosted by Mark Chrysler.

His look at the 1904 Games is among the best things he's ever done on that podcast, so please seek that out.

Now, the 1908 games in London were slightly better.

They were technically held as part of the Franco-British exhibition.

But this time around, the Games were more effectively promoted and organized, and they attracted a truly international cadre of athletes.

But arguably, the first games after 1896 to be remembered as an unambiguous success were the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

These games, which were fondly remembered as the Sunshine Olympics, were aided by good weather and a warm reception from the initially skeptical Swedish public.

Finally, out from under the shadow of the world's fairs, the Olympics were given a chance to succeed on their own merits.

At the 1912 Games, the ancient Greek pageantry had returned.

albeit in the more muted form that has come to be common at the modern games.

They seemed to get the mix right in Stockholm.

Greek symbolism was present, but the underlying Olympic ideas of international cooperation were able to take center stage.

The Stockholm Games was where the vibe of the modern Olympics really came into its own.

The Olympics became less backward-looking and more of a celebration of the now.

The success of that year's Olympiad ensured that the Games would survive the coming world war and would persist until this very day.

The 1912 Games only happened because of the dogged determination of the IOC to keep the Olympic idea alive.

De Coubertin may have stolen, or more charitably, borrowed the idea of a revived Olympics.

But there were so many times when the Olympics could have died, maybe should have died.

But they didn't, because this one plucky little French baron remained committed to the Olympic myth.

When the Games finally returned to Paris in 1924, de Coubertin was so pleased with how well they ran, he chose that moment to retire as the president of the IOC.

At the time of this recording, the 2024 Paris Games are in full swing.

In a way, they seem to represent the long arc of the Olympic movement.

The first Paris Games nearly killed the Olympics.

The second Paris Games ensured that they would last another 100 years.

And the third Paris Games, well, perhaps they represent a new renewal for the Olympics.

In the wake of a global pandemic, it's exciting to see the Olympic stadiums in France filled with spectators celebrating the best of human athletic achievement.

Ah, but look at me go.

Now I'm getting a little romantic.

If I've learned one thing about the Olympics, both ancient and modern, is that they've always been fraught with contradictions.

You see, those 1912 games in Stockholm were the first time the modern Olympics held an arts competition.

Medals were awarded in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.

The gold medal for literature that year was awarded to a poem entitled Ode to Sport, submitted in French, English, and German.

In one memorable stanza, the authors righteously wrote, quote, O sport, you are honor.

The laurels you bestow have no value unless they have been won in absolute fairness and with perfect impartiality.

He who with some shameful trick manages to deceive his fellow competitors, feels guilt to his very core, and lives in fear of the ignominious epitet which shall forever be attached to his name should his trickery be discovered.

The authors of that poem were identified as Georges Horod and Martin Eschbach.

But it was later revealed that these names had actually been a pseudonym.

The real author was IOC President Pierre de Coubertin.

I will give you exactly one guess about who judged the literature competition in 1912.

If you guessed, IOC President Pierre de Coubertin,

you get a gold medal.

Yes, de Coubertin gave himself a gold medal for writing a poem about how it's bad to cheat.

Beautiful ideals mixed with a weird, ironic reality.

That, my friends, is the Olympic spirit.

Okay,

that's all for this week, and that's all for season nine.

Join us again in September 2024 for the start of season 10.

But don't delete the feed in the meantime.

I'm going to be putting out throwback episodes with brand new introductions in the intervening weeks.

So there's still lots of good Our Fake History coming your way.

Thanks again for all of your support.

Thanks for being here through another season.

Thanks for sending me messages and reaching out.

I love all of you.

I love the community of people that listens to this show.

It's really nice.

And I honestly, really hope you've enjoyed watching the Olympics and listening to this podcast along with it.

It's been really fun to make these shows while the Olympics are going on.

Before we go, as always, I need to give some shout-outs.

Big ups to Carly Zabraschuk, to Kristen Sanders,

to

Evan Zwizzler,

to Patrick Thomas, to Connie Snow,

to Brandon Camp,

to Eric Pickering,

to

Humans Word,

to Damien, to Michelle, and to Lydia Inkwell.

All of these people have decided to pledge $5

or more every month on Patreon.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you to the patrons who support at all levels.

Thank you to people that support this show in free ways, like writing five-star reviews or telling their friends about it.

Just tell a friend.

Talk to your friends for once.

They miss you.

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I want to hear from you too.

If you want to get in touch with me, please send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

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As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, four,

There's nothing better than a one-place life.