I recently managed to stumble upon PBS’s The Real Olympics:
No event in the ancient world can be compared to the Olympic Games, held every four years and without interruption for nearly 12 centuries. The games drew tens of thousands of people from Greek colonies along the length of the Mediterranean and the shores of the Black Sea when Greek culture and influence were at their height.
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The games were almost 800 years old when Jesus Christ was born, and it took a special Christian edict to stop them, four centuries after his death. Abandoned and long forgotten, they would return in the modern age as the inspiration for the most prestigious sport event on earth.
The first episode — which I didn’t catch in full — “reveals how the ancient games have been appropriated and reinvented in the modern era by ideologues of all stripes and persuasions, including the Victorian upper classes and the Nazis.” The Victorians — or at least the Victorian aristocrats, like Pierre de Coubertin, who created the modern Olympics — wanted to believe that the ancient Olympics were a contest between wealthy aristocrats, amateurs who competed for the love of sport. Of course, the real ancient Olympics were win-at-all-costs competitions for prizes and glory, where athletes competed in the nude, with no signs of social rank.
Naturally, the Nazis, with their emphasis on physical fitness, invested a lot of national pride and money in the Berlin Olympics of 1936, and it’s the Nazis who are largely responsible for much of the pomp and circumstance we now associate with the games. In fact, the Nazis created the Olympic torch relay. From Olympic Flame:
For the ancient Greeks, fire had divine connotations — it was thought to have been stolen from the gods by Prometheus. Therefore, fire was also present at many of the sanctuaries in Olympia. A fire permanently burned on the altar of Hestia in Olympia. During the Olympic Games, which honoured Zeus, additional fires were lit at his temple and that of his wife, Hera. The modern Olympic flame is ignited at the site where the temple of Hera used to stand.Fire did not appear at the modern Olympics until 1928. Dutch architect Jan Wils had included a tower in his design for the Olympic stadium for the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and came up with the idea of having a fire burn throughout. On July 28, 1928 an employee of the Amsterdam electricity board lit the first Olympic fire in this so-called Marathontower, known as the “KLM’s ashtray” by the locals.
The idea of an Olympic Flame was met with enthusiasm, and was incorporated as a symbol of Olympism. German sports official and sports scientist Carl Diem conceived the idea of an Olympic torch relay for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. More than 3,000 runners carried the torch from Olympia to Berlin. German track and field athlete Fritz Schilgen was the last to carry the torch, igniting the flame in the stadium.