Author's Note- Welcome to 'A Short History of the Summer Olympic Games.' I hope that everyone will enjoy joining me for this whorl wind tour of the Summer Olympics. I have prewritten a bunch of these, so you can expect new posts every couple of days, but if you can't wait for the next installment feel free to take a gander at this stories companion piece 'A Short History of the Summer Olympic Games.' Now that the housekeeping has been taken care of, the Olympic flame for 2016 has been lit in Athens. Let's celebrate by looking at the first modern Olympic Games.
Disclaimer- I do not own Hetalia, and I have never actually been to a Summer Olympic Games, but that will not prevent me from finding opportunities to make fun of history.
Summer Olympics Games 1- Athens Greece
As much as Greece hated to admit it, the only reason that the world was holding a modern Olympic Games was because it was a French idea. To be specific it was the idea of a particular French man Pierre de Fred Baron de Coubertin (known as Pierre de Coubertin for brevities sake) who had managed to convince the Brits that they should abandon the Olympic like games that they had been holding for the last twenty years. They should instead put their money and effort into international games.
At first the British Empire had insisted that the first Olympics should be held in London. After all, England had hosted several national Olympics and so already had the venues, but the French and Greek governments had insisted that in honor of history, the first modern, international Olympic games had to be hosted at the birthplace of the original games, Athens Greece.
Greece turned out to be an excellent host and local enthusiasm quickly made the first Olympic Games the largest international sporting event to date. Fourteen different countries participated and even though many of the athletes didn't have fans from their country to cheer them on, Greece welcomed them with welcome arms and filled overflowing stadiums in order to watch the best athletes in the world compete.
Perhaps the greatest victory for the home team was when one of their countrymen swept the Marathon. The cheers had been deafening when Spyridon Louis had received the first place silver metal of Zeus while Khariloas Vasiakos received a copper runner-up metal. Winning the Marathon would making up for the fact that the United States ended up taking home 11 silver metals, one more than Greece's 10.
For a first time event, the first Olympics ran fairly smoothly with only two hiccups worth mentioning. The first was the fact that the sailing/boating competition had to be canceled due to a combination of bad weather, lack of participants, and most embarrassing a lack of boats. The second hiccup was a Greek woman who insisted that she be allowed to run the marathon despite the fact that it went against historical tradition and the president of the Olympics had officially stated that woman competing in the Olympics would be "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and incorrect." Despite the fact that the Olympic committee had made it clear that they would not accept Stamata Revithi running the marathon, she insisted on doing it the day after the official race. The only way the Greece could find to save face in such a disgraceful situation was to block the female runner from entering the stadium. Thus while Stamata would be able to run all she wanted in the streets of Athens, but because she would never be able to cross the official finish line Greece would be able to ignore her achievement.
After the first Olympics were such a success, Greece had started campaigning that the Olympics should stay in its historic home. In the end Greece loss and France was allowed to continue planning the 1900 Olympics for Paris. Still, Greece figured that eventually people would discover that no one could host an Olympic game as well as its birth country and fad of holding the games in countries around the world would end.
Historical Note- The Greek hopes that the Olympics would have a permanent home in Athens was never realized, but they didn't make them stop competing to bring the games back to its birth place. If you excluded the Intercalated Games of 1906 (which will be included in this little series) Athens would not host another Olympics for 108 years.
End Note- I hope that you enjoyed the mini history lesson and if you have little bits of Olympic history that you find particularly entertaining and would like to share please include them in the comments section. I am always looking for new tidbits for these stories.