Henry_Lewis_History_of_Olympics

Margaret Lyon, a visiting lecturer at Indiana University, interviews Dr. Phil Henson, who worked on the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. They discuss the history of the Olympics, starting with the ancient games in Greece which were religious ceremonies involving athletic events. The Romans took over the Olympics but changed them drastically, leading to their decline. In 1894, Baron Pierre Coubatin proposed reinstating the Olympic games as a way to promote peace and communication between countries. The first modern Olympic games were held in Athens in 1896. Initially, the Olympics were meant for aristocratic people and only amateurs were allowed to participate. However, over the years, this has changed and now anyone can be in the Olympics. Hello, my name is Margaret Lyon, and I'm a visiting lecturer at the School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation at Indiana University. In order to celebrate the Olympics that are coming up this summer, I'd like to speak to Dr. Phil Henson, who worked on the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Phil, could you introduce yourself a little bit? Yes, thank you. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at Indiana University, and I was a former track and field coach here, and I had the opportunity, starting in 1994, to spend time in Atlanta, as I say, trying to put on a little track meet. So I'm happy to be talking to Margaret here, and we'll try to answer any questions that she might have. Well, Phil, I don't think the Olympics would be considered a little track meet, but before we talk about anything else, when we were walking over here, you mentioned about the history of the Olympics, so could you give us an overview of the history of the Olympics? Sure. I'm a fan of the history of the Olympics, and you really have to define which Olympics you're talking about, because there are really two. There's the ancient Olympic Games, which started in 776 B.C., and went for about 1,400 years. Then there's the modern games, which started in 1896, and we've just celebrated a little more than 100 years. Going back to the ancient games, Greece, obviously, at that time, was the most advanced country in the world, and they were very religious, and of course, this was B.C., but they had a lot of religious things, such as the mountains, and the sky, and the stars, and every four years, they would have people from all over Greece who would travel from the various states of Greece to worship at Olympia. The Greeks were a very advanced society, and they believed very strongly that the mind, the body, and the spirit were all combined. Since they were here in a religious ceremony, they felt they should do something that involved the body as well, and that led to the development of the athletic part of this religious ceremony. Where they had this worship ceremony was in a little valley, and the people would sit on each side of the valley, and they would have religious ceremonies and rituals in the center of the valley, and so they decided to have a foot race, and the foot race was the length of the valley, and that was called the state, the one state, because that's where the name stadium comes from. For several hundred years, that was the only event they had, was this one 200-meter foot race, and then they gradually added some other events, including the long jump, or they called it the broad jump, the discus throw, and that's where you get that ancient statue, a very famous statue, the javelin throw, and then wrestling, and whoever won those five events was really considered the Olympic champion. One of the interesting things they did, at that time, a lot of the states in Greece were fighting with each other, and they wanted to make sure that people could travel safely to get to this religious ceremony, and so they established a policy which became known as the truce of gods, and the idea was that anyone that was traveling to worship at Olympia was given safe passage and wouldn't be attacked on the road or something of that nature. That led some people to believe that they actually stopped the wars. They didn't stop them, but they did give people safe passage, and as I said, these ancient games went on for about 1400 years, and then finally the Romans took over, and the Romans had a real different view of sport than the Greeks did. They liked to see a lot of violence. They liked to see people get killed, and that's what brought on the gladiators, and so the Romans took over the Olympic games, but they changed them drastically, and about this time while the Catholic Church was coming into power, and the Pope took a look at these gladiator events and said, this is no way to worship God, and so they put a stop to them, and so the Olympics died out, and in 1894, a Frenchman named Baron Pierre Coubatin saw that there was a lot of tension throughout the world, and obviously France and England had several wars, and World War I was building on the horizon, and so kind of to avoid this sort of thing, and to get better communication I think between countries, why Coubatin decided or proposed that we have, reinstate the Olympic games, and he invited several of his friends from various countries, particularly Germany and England, and one professor from Princeton University, and these are all rather aristocratic type people, and they had a meeting in 1894, and decided to reestablish the Olympic games, which became known as the modern Olympic games, and they scheduled them for two years later, which became 1896, and that's when the first of the modern games were held in Athens, Greece. One of the interesting things that I like to bring out is that a lot of people today question about whether the Olympics should be amateur or professional. Pierre Coubatin had an interesting take on that, and this has been changed I think over the years, but he felt that the Olympics should be for the aristocratic type people, the people who were the, had the money and owned everything, and he didn't feel that the working class people should be a part of it, and so they established, or he established a policy that said no professionals were allowed. Well, he wasn't referring to professional athletes, he was referring to people that worked for a living, such as, you know, farmers, and laborers, and peasants, and so in order to keep those kind of riff-raff out, he said that only amateurs, meaning only people like us, could be a part of this. Well, this has changed over the last hundred years, and now basically anyone can be in the Olympics, and it's certainly opened up to a lot more ethnic groups and that sort of thing, and so that's been good. The idea of the Olympics being strictly amateur is...