By LINCOLN ALLISON

The ancient games started in 1370 B.C. or
776 B.C., depending on which sources you
believe, and lasted until either A.D. 261 or
Theodosius' ban in A.D. 393.² They were not
amateur affairs, but involved professional
wrestlers and athletes. There was no ethos
that taking part was of great value in itself;
winning was what mattered and the "per-
formance principle," as it is now called, was
always in evidence. The Olympiad was not
particularly a sporting event, but a religious
and cultural festival, the only overlap with the
modern conception being athletics and wres-
tling. The "truce" for the Olympiad did not
suspend war or political machinations, but
merely allowed safe passage to the event.

The idea that the Olympiad represented
something ideal and universal that could,
therefore, be translated into modern terms, is
mildly fantastic. It presents, for example, an
obvious problem of the compatibility with
Christianity, as was evident in the composi-
tion and singing of a "hymn to Apollo" at
the Congress in Paris in 1894 that organized
the first modern games. The general context
in which all this assumed some plausibility
was nineteenth century vulgar classicism,
which held deeply admiring attitudes towards
antiquity. Personally, I think it is quite dif-
ficult to actually read, say, Thucydides, Taci-
tus, or Suetonius and maintain the assump-
tion that life in antiquity was more worthy,
noble, or honest than life in modern times;
for the most part it seems to be even more
squalid, corrupt, and lacking in a coherent
idea of worth. But clearly many people in the
nineteenth century did elevate antiquity in this
way. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who suc-
cessfully founded the modern Olympics, was
one of them, as were his predecessors (at least
five of them, Greek and English) who had
tried to revive the games between 1850 and
1890.³

The classical heritage of the games remains
something of an embarrassment in some
respects and there are regular attempts to
revive the place of poetry and other activities
that we would now classify as the arts in the
Olympiad. Sometimes they even take place,
though the attempts in Los Angeles in 1984
collapsed through lack of sponsorship.

But the myth of antiquity to which Couber-
tin subscribed was nothing compared with the
modern Olympic myth. This is a form of the
"Golden Age" syndrome. It says, at any one
time, that the games once represented every-
thing that was noble in sport: the eschewing
of material gain, participation for its own
sake, a spirit of sportsmanship that left
behind ideology and politics on a lower plane,
or a belief that all people could compete
equally. In fact, De Coubertin's ideas, at least
at the time the Olympics were founded, were
dominated by a desire to revive France's
power and credibility, so badly damaged by
defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.⁴ In
part, he saw the vigorous, muscular culture of
the English public schools as the solution to
French problems. He was an aristocratic
elitist, who saw these same institutions as a
defense against the egalitarianism of the age;
sport was for the few, for gentlemen.

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