The Olympics. Stephen Halliday

the Great was an enthusiastic supporter of the Games, one of his soldiers winning the pentathlon. From about 700 BC the competitions included foot races of varying lengths, wrestling, jumping, throwing (discus, javelin), while Jason’s Pentathlon involved running, jumping, discus, javelin and wrestling. In 680 BC ‘quadriga’ races were introduced, between chariots drawn by four horses like those memorably depicted in the film Ben Hur There was a brutal version of boxing in which the hands were covered in hard leather, weighted with metal strips. There were no ‘rounds’, the contest continuing until one man collapsed, bloody and exhausted, or acknowledged defeat by lifting a finger. There was also ‘pankration’ (literally ‘all force’) in which no holds were barred: boxing, wrestling, kicking and strangling were all permitted – but no gouging of the eyes! The Greek word for ‘contest’ is ‘agon’ from which our word ‘agony’ is derived; there was no room for wimps in the sports of the Ancient Greeks! Gymnastics were also introduced. In 396 BC contests were introduced for trumpet-blowers which would presumably have made the occasion as deafening as the ‘vuvuzelas’ which became such a prominent feature of the World Cup football tournament held in South Africa in 2010. In accordance with the instructions given to the king of Elis by the sacred oracle at Delphi, victors were garlanded with crowns of wild olives, and such was the prestige associated with victory that they were sometimes awarded pensions by their home cities even though they were competing as individuals and not as representatives of any state. In 412 BC Exainatos of Akragas in Sicily, after triumphs at the games, was welcomed home by 300 chariots which passed through a hole in the city wall since his fellow citizens thought that with such men they needed no walls to protect them. He also received a lifetime exemption from taxation. On the other hand, according to the poet Pindar, those who had performed poorly had to creep home surreptitiously and in one case a boxer called Alis had a mocking statue erected by his opponents ‘because he never hurt anyone’.

      CHEATING

      The first recorded cheating was in 388 BC at the 98th games when a boxer called Eupolos of Thessaly was found to have bribed his opponents in order to secure his victory. They were all fined and the money was used to build bronze statues of Zeus which lined the road to the stadium at Olympia.

      MADE IN ENGLAND:

       REVIVING THE OLYMPICS

      The Cotswold Olympicks

       Shin-kicking and navvies

      After the abolition of the games in 393 AD by Theodosius they disappeared for 1,200 years from the sporting calendar though they were remembered in the classical syllabuses which dominated English schools and universities. An early reference to the revival of the Olympics in England may be found in the career of Robert Dover. He came from a Catholic family in Norfolk and was a student at Cambridge in 1595 at a time when ‘Gog Magog Games’ were being held on the Gog Magog hills outside the city. The games were described, humorously, as ‘Olympik’ at a time when students would have been familiar with the ancient games because the study of the classical world dominated the Cambridge curriculum. Dover was a Catholic sympathizer who left Cambridge without taking a degree to avoid the need to swear the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Elizabeth I’s authority over the English church. He qualified as a barrister at Gray’s Inn and in 1610 he settled at Saintbury in Gloucestershire following his marriage to a local widow. In 1612, at Whitsuntide, he organized the ‘Cotswold Games’ on a hill close to his home near Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire’s beautiful Vale of Evesham. Competitors were summoned to the hill (now known as ‘Dover’s Hill’) by a hunting horn and took part in sports such as horse-racing, wrestling, fencing, throwing the sledge-hammer and shin-kicking! Dover was acutely conscious of the Greek heritage of the games but dismissive of the Greeks of the 17th century, rather unfairly since the Greeks were by that time ruled by the Ottoman Turks. He expressed his contempt in verse:

      When Greece frequented active Sport and Playes,

      From other men they bore away the Prayse;

      Their Commonwealth did flourish; and their Men

      Unmatched were for Worth and Honour then.

      But when they once those Pastimes did forsake

      And unto Drinking did themselves betake,

      So base they grew that at this present day

      They are not men, but moving lumps of clay.

      SHIN-KICKING

      Shin-kicking was, if anything, worse than it sounds. Working men, in hobnail boots or clogs, would kick each other’s shins until one of them fell to the ground. The skilful contestant up-ended his opponent in mid-kick, while he was off balance, but bouts could last 45 minutes amidst much blood. The contests are still held in Chipping Campden but participants now wear Wellington boots packed with straw to avoid serious injury.

      The Cotswold Games were briefly suppressed during the Puritan ascendancy following the Civil War of the 1640s but were resumed with the restoration of Charles II and became known as the Cotswold Olympicks. Dover died in 1652 but the games continued intermittently until 1852 when they attracted controversy because of the participation of a number of ‘navvies’ (labourers) who were building the nearby Chipping Campden Tunnel for Isambard Kingdom Brunel on a branch of the Great Western Railway. The behaviour of the navvies offended some local residents (they were probably spectacularly good at shin-kicking) but the games were revived in 1951 to mark the Festival of Britain and again in 1963, by which time Dover’s Hill had passed into the possession of the National Trust.

      Isambard Kingdom Brunel

      By 1636 the ‘Cotswold Olympicks’ were sufficiently well known to attract a volume of verse published in praise of them. The contributors included Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson and Shakespeare himself refers to the Olympics in his plays. There has been much speculation about whether Shakespeare knew Robert Dover, a contemporary, and whether the playwright visited the Cotswold Games from his home in nearby Stratford before his death in 1616. In Henry VI Part III Shakespeare refers to ‘Such rewards as victors wear at the Olympian games’. The Cotswold Games did not pass unnoticed in other quarters.

      William Shakespeare

      Pierre de Fredi, Baron Coubertin (1863–1937)

       ‘Anglomaniacs of Sport’

      Baron Pierre de Coubertin was born in Paris on 1 January 1863 and was descended from nobility on both sides of his family, his father tracing his lineage back to medieval Rome. When Coubertin was seven years old, in 1870, France suffered humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, an experience that prompted many influential Frenchmen to look across the Channel and ask themselves how the British had managed to build a world-wide empire while France languished. One of those Frenchmen was the writer Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) who visited England and, in 1872, published Notes sur L’Angleterre which praised the English system of education, particularly as created by Dr Thomas Arnold at Rugby, and noted approvingly the role of sport in English schools.