How the First Olympics Worked

The first Olympics took place in the sixth century in order to build diplomacy across the Greek world. Learn more about the history of the first Olympics in this HowStuffWorks.com podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined today by staff writer Joshua
m Clark. How's it going, josh, Let's going well, Candice?
How are you fabulous? So? Candice? I know you and

(00:23):
your fiance still love to run marathons? Right? Do you
watch the Olympics? Are you excited about the Olympics coming? Well? Okay,
I have a question for you today about some of
the early Olympics. The first Olympics, Um, the first recorded
Olympics was what's right? Okay, But there's evidence that it
goes back, you know, two fifty years before that, Yeah,

(00:43):
to like Greek god times when the zoos battled it
out and became king of the gods because he won
an Olympic events. And most of the evidence we have
is just legend, and we've had to discern you know,
what happened originally from just looking at pottery basically, right,
and a couple of poems written by people like Pliny
the Elder, Right, Okay, But but ultimately, um, we we

(01:07):
know that all of these legends, all these descriptions all
go back to the Olympics being started as a tribute
to Zeus, the god of gods on Mountain Olympus. Right, okay, Well,
so with the Olympics. Originally, UM, it was a one
day event and it was actually just a single event,
the stadium race, okay, which is them running six feet

(01:29):
and it was one day. I can't imagine that took
very long to to to hold that event, but UM
ultimately it caught on in such popularity that all these
generally warring city states that neighbored one another UM would
take on an Olympic truce during the Olympics and all
fighting would stop, all feuds would be off, so that

(01:50):
these UM Olympic athletes could come into Olympus where they
held the Olympics. Right, logically enough, UM and UM compete
for that one day. So they took it pretty seriously.
Right now, I've I've read your article pretty thoroughly and
I loved it on how how the first Olympics worked.
But I noticed that it was very male centric there.

(02:12):
There wasn't too much talk about women, and I had
heard that UM women actually were very much discouraged from
you know, even watching the Olympics, that they could be
killed for doing so. Is that fact or is that fiction?
Can you clear that up? That's actually a fact. Young
virgins could watch the Olympic events, but married women absolutely
were forbidden, and the punishment for sninking in and watching

(02:35):
the games was actually death. Women were hurled off the
pinnacle of Mount Type Hand, which stands about four ninety
feet high. And there's actually a pretty famous legend about
Collie Pittera who trained her son to compete in the Olympics,
and she herself came from a long line of Olympic victors,
and she snuck in. She was determined to watch her
son compete, and when he won, she was so excited

(02:57):
that she ran forward to congratulate, and her clothes were
ripped off of her in the process, and obviously it
was revealed that she was a woman, but because again
she had such Olympic routs, they decided to pardon her.
And there's actually no archaeological evidence that anyone was thrown
off the mountain. I guess they were looking for bones
at the base of Taipeian and they couldn't find them,

(03:18):
but women pretty much stayed away. They learned their last time.
Would do it for me it's yeah, pretty high. And
also toward the eighth century, a lot of the athletes
started competing naked. And maybe this was for momentum or
or you know, less traction when they were running, but
also it could have been an effort to discern whether
the competitors were men or women competing in disguise. I

(03:39):
imagine it just felt good. Yeah, you know, I get
the breeze in there. So if you want to learn
more about the First Olympics, you can read How the
First Olympics Worked on how stuff works dot com for
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