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Olympian myths

William Ecenbarger is a free-lance writer in Hummelstown, Pa. The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London will be a multibillion-dollar spectacle of about 14,000 athletes from 204 nations participating in 26 sports. Many gold-medal winners will earn huge amounts from lucrative promotional deals or endorsement contracts.

The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London will be a multibillion-dollar spectacle of about 14,000 athletes from 204 nations participating in 26 sports. Many gold-medal winners will earn huge amounts from lucrative promotional deals or endorsement contracts.

It all seems a far cry from the noble origins of the Games about 30 centuries ago at the sacred grove of Olympia in a tranquil Greek valley. Those Games were a byword for selfless sportsmanship, which the founders of the modern Olympic movement sought to emulate.

Right? Wrong! The ancient Games were in fact startlingly similar in many ways to today's, according to research by classical scholars.

Much of what is popularly believed about the original Olympic Games is either simply not true or quite modern in origin. This bogus antiquity is largely the legacy of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat who founded the modern Games by looking fondly back to ancient Greece through olive-colored glasses. Today, the myths endure.

Take the "Olympic Spirit." The ideal of friendly competition in an atmosphere of brotherhood and peace among nations is pure hogwash. It is a misinterpretation of the Olympic Truce, which began around the eighth century B.C. and forbade participating city-states from engaging in warfare before, during, and after the original five-day festival. But the motives of the ancients were practical: They simply wanted the athletes and their fans to reach Olympia without becoming war casualties.

For many Greeks, one of the main purposes of the competition was to prepare men for battle. The Games were "an important aspect of a warrior's life, an exemplification of his arete [prowess]," according to Wendy J. Raschke, a classics professor at the University of California, Riverside.

The long jump, the javelin throw, and a foot race by armor-clad runners all had an eye toward war. And the most popular event was the pankration, a violent, bloody, no-holds-barred street brawl in which the only things forbidden were biting or gouging out an opponent's eyes.

Next consider "Winning Doesn't Matter." This lofty ideal was enunciated by de Coubertin: "The most important thing in life is not the victory but the contest."

But winning meant everything to the ancient Greeks. There were no awards for second and third place at the ancient Olympics. The losers crept home in dishonor, as Pindar tells us: "They slunk through the back alleys, separately and furtively, painfully stung by their loss."

Nor were they above cheating to achieve victory. Bribery was especially prominent. Eupolos, a boxer from Thessaly, won by bribing his opponents. Callippus of Athens also paid off his adversaries in the pentathlon. Wrestlers secretly oiled parts of their bodies to thwart an opponent's grip.

Once again, this month the legend will be aired that in 490 B.C., the Athenians defeated the Persians on the plain of Marathon, and the Greeks sent Pheidippides to Athens to announce the victory. He ran the distance, declared, "Rejoice! We conquer," and dropped dead.

Olympic marathon runners will reinforce this myth by running the requisite distance of 26 miles, 385 yards.

But the longest race in the early Games was about three miles. The race we call the marathon was created about 2,500 years later. It was part of the first modern Olympics, held in Athens in 1896 to commemorate an ancient run that may or may not have happened.

"When the ancient Games of Olympia were about to be reborn in Athens during 1896 in the form of a global sports competition, it became appropriate for this legendary run to assume a modern reality," explains David E. Martin in his definitive history, The Olympic Marathon.

The first Olympic marathons ranged from 25 to 27 miles. It wasn't until the 1924 Games in Paris that it was decided to adopt the standard distance of 26 miles, 385 yards, which was used at the 1908 London Games and was the exact distance from the start at Windsor Castle to the White City Stadium.

Then we have the Gold Medal Myth: the purity of amateurism. For athletes of old, the bottom line was as important as the finishing line. "An Olympic win was a passport to fame, riches, and occasionally even appearance money at other festivals," says Judith Swaddling of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum in London. Olympic winners from Athens were paid a cash equivalent of five years' earnings for a workingman, and that didn't include other perks, like a lifetime of free meals.

The word athlete is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning "one who competes for a prize." So how did the idea of amateurism come about? That's the 64,000-drachma question. The answer, again, is de Coubertin, whose amateur-only policy was a way of keeping athletes from a lower social class out of the Games.

The organizers of the modern Games applied the inaccurate ancient precedent of amateurism because they were "committed from the outset to restricting competition to the leisured elite," according to Mark Golden, a classics professor at the University of Winnipeg. Only rich people could afford to compete.

This approach has caused a lot of grief, most notably to Jim Thorpe, the great Native American athlete, who was stripped of the gold medals he won in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Games in Stockholm after it was learned that he had played semiprofessional baseball for $15 per week. In taking Thorpe's medals back, de Coubertin cited "the careful way that antiquity allowed participation in the Olympics only to those athletes who were irreproachable."

Jim Thorpe, it seems, was sacrificed to a false Greek god.