One Hundred Years of Olympics. The modern Olympic Games, first held in 1896 in Athens, Greece, celebrated its first 100 years of international sports competition in 1996. In this article from the 1997 Collier's Year Book, senior editor Joseph Gustaitis traced the highlights of the century of games, including the triumph of Greek runner Spiridon (also spelled Spyridon) Louis in the 1896 marathon, the supremacy of Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi in the three games of the 1920s, and American athlete Jesse Owens's capture of four gold medals in track and field at the 1936 games in Berlin. Gustaitis pointed out that controversies over issues such as political boycotts and drug use have also played a role in the Olympic Games. . One Hundred Years of Olympics By Joseph Gustaitis The modern-day Olympics celebrated their 100th birthday in 1996 with an extravaganza of a show. They had come a long way from their modest origins. The 1996 games boasted the most athletes, most countries, and most medal winners in history. In their century of existence, however, the Olympics had not lost sight of their founder's vision of sport as a means of bringing the peoples of the globe together. Concerns were widely voiced in 1996 over the ubiquitous influence of the almighty dollar, but the Olympics still maintained the power to captivate the world in a quadrennial display of the loftiest heights that the frail human frame can scale. Coubertin the Visionary The first modern Olympic Games were inspired by a British schoolmaster, organized by a Frenchman, and held in Greece. That French visionary was an undersized, hyperkinetic aristocrat named Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937). An accomplished fencer, boxer, and rower, he visited Britain in 1887 and was impressed by the zeal with which students there took part in athletics. Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), a Rugby School headmaster famed as an educational reformer, became his idol. Arnold had drawn attention to the character-building value of sports, and Coubertin developed into a crusader for physical education. In 1889, Coubertin organized the Congress of Physical Education in Paris, and three years later he revealed plans to revive the Olympic Games of the ancient Greeks. The baron hoped the Olympics might promote international amity through peaceful competition. To further his idea, Coubertin established the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The first Olympic Games were originally slated to be held in Paris in 1900, but Coubertin grew impatient and moved the date to 1896. The Festival Begins It seemed fitting that the honor of hosting the games should fall to Athens. Funding was a problem--the Greek government was in debt--but a Greek millionaire named George Averoff helped out with a donation. An arena was built on the foundations of the long-vanished Panathenaic Stadium, and the first modern Olympics opened on April 6, 1896. Because the surface of the new track was so loose, the times in the running events were slow. The era's training standards were such that Robert Garrett of the United States won the discus event even though he had never thrown an Olympic discus before coming across one in Athens (the homemade discus he had experimented with--and given up on--at home turned out to be much heavier than the official one). The swimming events were held in the sea near Piraeus; the water was so cold that one American competitor, after plunging in, screamed and fled back to the start. Yet the games were well run and, in terms of spectacle and enthusiasm, would not be matched for many years. The 1896 games provided one of the most stirring moments in Olympic history. Up until the marathon, the Americans had dominated the track-and-field events, and, as one U.S. athlete, Ellery H. Clark, later wrote, 'The Greeks seemed to feel that the national honor was at stake.' As the fans awaited the marathon victor in the stadium, a Greek horseman galloped in and delivered a message to the royal box. Soon a great cry went up, 'Elleen! Elleen!' (A Greek! A Greek!), whereupon Spiridon Louis of Greece ran into the tumultuous stadium as thousands of pigeons soared into the sky. The modern Olympics had its first hero. Getting over the Hurdles The next three Olympics attracted more athletes and saw stronger performances but otherwise did not measure up to Athens. The 1900 Paris Olympics were upstaged by the concurrent Exposition Universelle and were spread out over two months. The 1904 games in remote St. Louis were subordinated to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition; over three-fourths of the competitors were Americans, and even Coubertin did not attend. The 1908 London Olympics were also overshadowed by another event (the Franco-British Exhibition), and the competition was stained by nasty arguments over rules between the visitors and their British hosts. But the 1912 games in Stockholm were a success. Over 2,500 athletes took part, including 57 women. (They had first been allowed to participate in 1900--in golf and tennis. By 1912 women's swimming was on the program.) The star of the games was Jim Thorpe of the United States. Thorpe, who was primarily of American Indian descent, began with a victory in the pentathlon so decisive that he could have sat out the final event and still won the gold medal. He followed with a decathlon triumph that obliterated the world record by nearly 1,000 points. Thorpe's subsequent history is a sad tale. It was discovered that he had once earned $25 a week playing minor league baseball, and his medals were rescinded; he died in poverty in 1953. Three decades later his medals were restored--to his children. Because Thorpe earned money by playing a sport, he was technically not an amateur, and as early as 1892 the IOC insisted that every Olympic competitor be one. Yet the question of who is--and isn't--an amateur perplexed the IOC from the start. At first, the amateurism requirement barred not just persons who played sports for money but anyone who received wages for labor of almost any kind. Eventually amateurism came to exclude only those--like Thorpe--who profited from athletics. Yet as early as the 1920s the British complained that U.S. college athletes were violating the spirit of amateurism by accepting scholarship funds. And when Communist regimes began building their sports machines, they claimed that because professional sport did not exist in their lands, all of their athletes were, by definition, amateurs, even though state funds were poured into training them. In 1988 the IOC decided to let the various international sporting federations determine whether professionals could compete in the Olympics. Today, only Olympic baseball and boxing bar professionals (soccer admits them, but to a limited extent). A Parade of Stars Because of World War I, the 1916 games, scheduled for Berlin, were not held; the Olympics picked up again in Antwerp in 1920. The 1920s saw the emergence of a phenomenal group of athletes from Finland. Led by the runner Paavo Nurmi, whose record of nine lifetime gold medals in track and field went unequaled until Carl Lewis of the United States won his ninth in 1996, the Finns went on a rampage extending over three Olympics. In the 1924 Paris Games, for example, Finland finished second to the United States with 14 gold medals, 13 silver, and ten bronze. The first Winter Olympic Games were held in Chamonix, France, in 1924. The 1928 Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland, witnessed the first of three consecutive gold medals in figure skating by the Norwegian Sonja Henie, who revolutionized her sport with her balletic moves. In 1932 the Olympics came to Los Angeles, where the first bona fide female track and field star emerged--Mildred ('Babe') Didrikson of Texas, who set world records in the high jump and 80-meter hurdles and won the gold medal in the javelin on her first throw. Controversy and Politics The 1936 Olympics were awarded to Berlin in May 1931; no one had a clue that less than two years later, in early 1933, Adolf Hitler would be the German chancellor, with nightmarish consequences for the entire world. As the date of the games approached, many called for a boycott, but others argued that to bolt the games would be to mix politics with sport--never mind that Hitler was doing that as furiously as possible, expecting that the pageant would legitimize his regime. In a sense the Olympic movement had always been political--Coubertin, after all, saw the games as a way to promote world peace. Paradoxically, Coubertin's internationalist ethos sanctioned nationalism in a way that would inevitably be exploited. From the beginning, national flags were raised after victories, and by 1908 it was no longer possible for an athlete to compete as an individual, but only as part of a national team. In 1921 the IOC denounced the publication of tables showing medal counts by nation, but fans inevitably began to see the games as a competition not between individuals but between countries. Thus the games came to be regarded as a place for partisan statement. A notable instance was the 'black power' salute that U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave on the victory stand in Mexico City in 1968. Four years later members of the Palestinian extremist group Black September chose the Munich Olympics as a venue for publicizing their grievances by breaking into the Olympic Village; 11 Israeli athletes were killed. South Africa was excluded from the Olympics from 1960 through 1988 because of its racist apartheid policies; after New Zealand sent a rugby team to South Africa, its presence at the Montreal Olympics of 1976 caused many African nations to boycott the Montreal games. The United States, along with many other nations, stayed away from the 1980 Moscow Olympics in objection to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, and Moscow returned the favor in 1984 by boycotting the Los Angeles games. But politics aside, the 1936 games were spectacular. Over 4,000 competitors took part, as opposed to only some 1,400 in Los Angeles in 1932. The Germans came up with the idea of a relay run to carry the Olympic flame from Greece, and the hometown crowd had the satisfaction of seeing Germany lead the medal count with 89. Yet the headliner was Jesse Owens, a 22-year-old African-American who won four gold medals in track and field and, despite puncturing the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority, was adored by the German fans. Bigger and Bigger World War II put a halt to the games, and they did not resume until 1948 in London. For the first time a woman dominated track and field, as Fanny Blankers-Koen of the Netherlands, at age 30, won four of the nine women's events--and probably would have won more if Olympic rules did not then limit the number of events an athlete could enter. The Soviet Union entered the Olympics at the 1952 Helsinki games, and the world got its first look at the great Soviet sports dynamo, as Soviet athletes took second place to the United States in total medals (76 to 71). In 1956 at Melbourne, Australia, they leaped into first place. But the star of the 1952 games came from Czechoslovakia, as the popular runner Emil Zatopek followed up victories in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters by taking the gold medal in the marathon, the first he had ever run. In 1956 in Melbourne, hometown fans thrilled to the feats of sprinter Betty Cuthbert, who won the 100 and 200-meter dashes and anchored the world-record-setting Australian 4 x 100 meter relay team, and swimmer Dawn Fraser, who won the first of three consecutive gold medals in the 100 meters. The Melbourne games attracted only some 3,300 athletes, fewer than in London or Helsinki, but after that, beginning with the 1960 Rome games, which drew nearly 5,400, the modern Olympics grew and grew, adding ever more countries, until the 1996 Atlanta games hosted nearly 11,000 competitors. Two memorable runners stood out in Rome. American sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who in childhood had endured double pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio, earned three gold medals, and barefooted Ethiopian Abebe Bikila won the marathon. His victory signaled the arrival of the African runners. Bikila (now shod) captured the marathon again in Tokyo in 1964, and another Ethiopian, Mamo Wolde, won it in 1968 in Mexico City, where Kenyans finished 1-2 in the 3,000-meter steeplechase. Ever since, Kenyans have dominated this event, winning it every time they entered. As the games went on, more and more new athletes captured the world's attention. In Tokyo, Soviet gymnast Larysa Latynina won six medals, bringing her Olympic total to a record 18, and U.S. sprinter Bob Hayes made up a 3-meter gap in the anchor leg of the men's 4 x 100-meter relay by running probably faster than any human has ever done. No one is sure how quickly he flew down that final 100 meters, but the slowest estimate was 8.9 seconds; as of the 1996 Olympics the world record in the 100-meters was 9.84 (by Donovan Bailey of Canada). In 1968, Bob Beamon of the United States uncorked a staggering 8.90-meter (29' 2 1/2') long jump, annihilating the world record of 8.35 meters (27' 4 3/4') so decisively that his feat has been called the greatest athletic achievement of all time. At the Winter Games in Grenoble, France, that same year, Jean-Claude Killy of France became skiing's first superstar by capturing all three gold medals in the Alpine events. The 1972 Munich Games belonged to U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz--who competed in seven events and won seven gold medals (all in world-record time)--and to 16year-old Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut. Although she won two individual gold medals, she was not the dominant female gymnast, finishing only seventh in the women's all-around. Nevertheless, ABC-TV, recognizing the appeal of her pixieish personality, concentrated its cameras on her and thus inaugurated the era of the teenybopper female gymnast, one that found its acme in the performance of Romania's 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci, who scored seven perfect 10s in Montreal in 1976. U.S. sports fans saw very little of the boycotted 1980 Moscow games, since NBC (which had the U.S. television rights that year) canceled its coverage. Soviet gymnast Aleksandr Dityatin became to first person to win eight medals in one Olympics, but his performance was tarnished by the absence of Japan, which, based on earlier Olympic performances, seemed likely to offer the Soviet men stiff competition. No boycotts marred the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, NY, where U.S. speed skater Eric Heiden won five gold medals and the U.S. hockey team staged one of sport's greatest upsets by defeating the Soviets and earning the gold medal. U.S. fans, however, hardly seemed to care that the Soviets and their friends didn't come to the 1984 Los Angeles games, in which Carl Lewis of the United States duplicated Jesse Owens's four-gold-medal performance, and Britain's Daley Thompson won his second consecutive decathlon. But just about everyone showed up for the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea, where Greg Louganis of the United States became the first male diver to win both the springboard and platform events twice in a row. The issue of performance-enhancing drugs, which had been simmering for years, came to a boil in 1988. Canada's Ben Johnson won the 100-meter dash in worldrecord time only to have his medal withdrawn when a urine test discovered traces of a banned steroid. There have been over 50 positive drug tests in Olympic athletes since 1968, and suspicions that steroid use among Eastern bloc athletes was widespread proved true after the fall of Communism. The Winter Olympics were held in Albertville, France, in 1992, but the next Winter Games, in Lillehammer, Norway, took place just two years later, the IOC having decided to stagger the cycles of the summer and winter games. This meant that there would be some kind of Olympics every two years instead of four. Sponsors, Money, and Television When the 1992 games arrived in Barcelona, it was clear that there was a huge new factor in Olympic life--commercialism and marketing. The streets were plastered with billboards identifying products with athletes, one of the most prominent being U.S. basketball titan Michael Jordan. Of course, the billboards were signs of success--the Olympics had become a huge hit, a marketer's dream. The U.S. television rights for the Barcelona games went for $400 million; in 1995, NBC-TV bought the U.S. rights to the games of 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 for a grand total of $3.55 billion. The organizers of the 1996 Atlanta Games used no public funds; to meet the $2.3 billion cost of hosting the spectacle, they relied not only on TV money and ticket sales, but also on hefty contributions from a host of corporate sponsors, resulting in a phantasmagoria of advertising. About the author: Joseph Gustaitis is a senior editor on the Collier's Year Book staff. Source: 1997 Collier's Year Book. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
