A committee of 16 women organized it in honor of the goddess Hera, and the women competed in three age categories. There was, however, essentially an Olympics for unmarried girls at the same stadium in Olympia. Legend has it that if any woman tried to sneak in, she’d be thrown off Mount Typaeon. The women: Married women were said to have been banned from watching the games. He “paid off everyone” so he wouldn’t have to actually compete against anyone and won six olive wreaths and events in the four-horse chariot race in 67 A.D., according to Romano. Perhaps the most memorable of all wasn’t even an athlete: After Rome conquered Greece, Emperor Nero was desperate to become an Olympic victor. But when he ran for its rival city in Sicily, Syracuse, his statue in Croton was demolished. When he ran for the city of Croton in the first race, residents erected a statue to him. Astylos was another acclaimed runner who won the stade and diaulos race in three Olympiads. Leonidas of Rhodes was arguably the best runner, winning 12 olive wreaths, while the official Olympics website recognizes Milon of Croton as a six-time wrestling champion. Stewart, a professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology at the University of California-Berkeley, is that the ancient Greeks, while they kept track of who won, didn’t seem to have kept records like fastest time. One important distinction between the modern and ancient Olympic, says Andrew F. (Which is only fitting: “Athlete” is an ancient Greek word for “one who competes for a prize.”) The prizes: Victors received olive wreaths cut from a sacred grove and cash awards from their home city, says Romano. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter
Romano suspects that practice was useful for the wrestling and pankration so it’s “less easy for someone to get a hold of your body” or to “protect skin while you’re rolling around in the sand.” While no eye-gauging or biting was allowed, strangulation was fair game in pankration, says Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games.Īrchaeological evidence reveals that athletes coated their bodies in olive oil. There were equestrian events like chariot racing, wrestling and boxing, and a wrestling-boxing hybrid called pankration. A long distance race was later added, and eventually, javelin, discus and long jump, said to have been accompanied by flute music. Then came the diaulos, in which athletes would do that twice. The sports: The 2016 Olympic athletes will compete in 42 different sports, but ancient Olympics started with only one, the stade race, in 776 B.C., for which athletes would just run the length of the stadium. Emperor Theodosius, a Christian, considered them pagan. Why it stopped: Religious conflict led to the abolishment of the games in 393 A.D., by which point the Roman empire controlled the region. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project in Acadia, the site of a possible precursor to the Olympic games).
“Those who competed competed to please a god or goddess or a hero,” says David Gilman Romano, the Karabots Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Arizona School of Anthropology (who spoke to TIME by phone from the Mt. The games, held at a sanctuary site for Zeus in Olympia, were part of a religious festival held in honor of the God.
Why it started: While sports fans might figuratively worship certain athletes at the Rio Olympics, actual religious worship was a key part of the ancient games.