Our tour director gave us a history of the Olympic Games as we walked among the remains of the Gymnasium and the Temples of Hera and Zeus. At the Olympic stadium, which is shown above, (it is not an oval track as you might imagine), I ran the same distance as athletes in ancient times ran. Being a track athlete during the high school and college days, and the fact that the Olympic Games is celebrating its 100 years anniversary in Atlanta, I just felt compel to run. Now I can say I ran in both the Ancient Olympic Stadium and in the Olympic Stadium where the first modern Olympic games were stage (Athens). Visited the museum. Remarkable displays are Praxiteles’ magnificent statue of Hermes and Nike, goddess of victory.

Ancient Olympia

A brief History of the Games

According to legend, this area was inhabited by the Pisans. Their King was Oinomaus, whose daughter Hippodameia had married Pelops. There are indications that already by 1000 BC, games were being held in honour of the couple. Though exclusively local at the start, the games began gradually to attract the interest of the other towns in the vicinity. In 776 BC, the leader of the Eleians, Iphitos, rededicated the games to the honour of Zeus.

This date marks the first Olympiad; afterwards every four years panhellenic contests were held attracting athletes from all the Greek city-states. While the Games were taking place, the Olympic Truce was in force and all hostilities suspended. The victor's prize was a crown made from a wild olive branch, which was always cut from the same tree, the Kallistefano.

" Tinella kallinike" -- Well done, glorious victor shouted the crowd in praise of the winner. Back in his birthplace, people would knock down the city walls. The Olympic Games, which included the foot-race, wrestling, the Pankration, the Pentathlon, chariot racing and horse racing, as well as artistic and literary competitions, came to an end in 393 AD, with the prohibitory edict of Theodosios I.

Fifteen centuries later, in 1896, they were revived where they had been born, in Greece, by the French historian and educator Pier de Coubertin. Since then every four years a torch bearer, like the ancient heralds, starts out from Olympia bearing the sacred flame to the place where the Games are held.