dokumen.pub_the-games-a-global-history-of-the-olympics-1nbsped-0393292770-9780393292770.pdf

DAVID GOLDBLATT WINNER OF THE 2015 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR THE GAMES ‘Goldblatt manages to combine being extremely readable with being extremely serious’ SIMON KUPER A GLOBAL HISTORY OF THE OLY...

DAVID GOLDBLATT WINNER OF THE 2015 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR THE GAMES ‘Goldblatt manages to combine being extremely readable with being extremely serious’ SIMON KUPER A GLOBAL HISTORY OF THE OLYMPICS The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity. Seventeen days of sporting competition watched in every country on the planet, it is simply the greatest show on earth. Yet when the modern games were inaugurated in Athens in 1896, the founders thought them a ‘display of manly virtue’, an athletic celebration of the kind of amateur gentleman that would rule the world. How was such a ritual invented? Why did it prosper and how has it been so utterly transformed? In The Games, David Goldblatt - winner of the 2015 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award - takes on a breathtakingly ambitious search for the answers and brilliantly unravels the complex strands of this history. Beginning with the Olympics as a sporting side show and their transformation into a global media spectacular care of Hollywood and the Nazi Party, The Games shows how sport and the Olympics have been a battlefield in the global cold war, a defining moment for our epoch of social and economic change. I\luminated with dazzling vignettes from over a century of Olympic competition, this stunningly researched history captures the excitement 1875779 C90 of sporting brilliance and the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games. It shows us how this sporting spectacle has come to reflect the world we hope to inhabit and the one we actually live in. £20 THE GAMES  Also by David Goldblatt THE BALL IS ROUND THE FOOTBALL BOOK THE GAME OF OUR LIVES FUTEBOL NATION  DAVID GOLDBLATT THE GAMES A GLOBAL HISTORY OF THE OLYMPICS MACMILLAN  First published 2016 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-1-4472-9884-7 Copyright © David Goldblatt 2016 The right of David Goldblatt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The picture credits on page 518 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book. 135798642 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset by Ellipsis Digital Limited, Glasgow Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you're always first to hear about our new releases.  Contents List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 1: THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK The Reinvention of the Olympic Games 5 2: ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR The Olympics at the End of the Belle Epoque 53 3: NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN The Olympics and Its Challengers in the 1920s 93 4: IT’S SHOWTIME! The Olympics as Spectacle 147 5: SMALL WAS BEAUTIFUL The Lost Worlds of the Post-war Olympics 193 6: THE IMAGE IS STILL THERE Spectacle versus Anti-Spectacle at the Games 231 7: THINGS FALL APART Bankruptcy, Boycotts and the End of Amateurism 287 8: BOOM! The Globalization of the Olympics after the Cold War 327 9: GOING SOUTH The Olympics in the New World Order 389 Conclusion 437 Notes 447 Index 491  List of Illustrations The Baron: Pierre Fredy, Baron de Coubertin. The first International Olympic Committee. From left to right: standing — Gebhardt, Guth-Jarkovsky, Kemeney, Balck; seated — Coubertin, Vikelas, Butovsky. Making History: Athens 1896. — The Martial Art of the European Aristocracy: Fencing at the Zappeion. — Adisplay of manly virtues’. Three of Denmark’s Olympian gentlemen. From left to right: Schmidt (track), Nielsen (fencing) and Jensen (weightlifting and shooting). Human Zoos and Freak Shows. — St Louis, 1904: An Ainu man competing at the St Louis Anthropology Days. — Imperial Circus. London 1908: Italy’s marathon runner Dorando Pietri falls for the third time in the stadium and is illegally helped to his feet. A challenge from below, the Worker’s Olympics: Vienna 1931, Antwerp 1937. — Working-class super heroes. — ‘Proletarians of the world, unite through sport!’ It’s Showtime! Los Angeles 1932. — Sun, Sea, Sand and Sport. The Olympics done the LA way. — Antiquity comes to Hollywood. A concrete coliseum for the twentieth century. The Olympic Family, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1936. From left to right: Rudolf Hess, Henri de Baillet-Latour and Adolf Hitler at the opening ceremony of the 1936 Winter games.. Not just Hitler’s Games, Berlin 1936. The Indian Hockey Team. They would go on to thrash Nazi Germany in the final 8-1. Coming on Strong, Amsterdam 1928, London 1948. — Lina Radke wins the only women’s 800m at the games before the 1960s. — Fanny Blankers-Koen wins the 200m. From Ephebes to Abstraction: Olympic posters, 1912 to 1964. The Empire Strikes Back, Rome 1960: the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila wins the marathon beneath the Arch of Constantine. The Science Fiction Olympics, Tokyo 1964: Tange Kenzo’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium. The Image Remains, Mexico 1968. — Tommie Smith (centre) and John Carlos give the black power salute supported by Australian Peter Norman. — Bob Beamon jumps 8.9m and off the scale. Spectacle vs Anti-Spectacle, Munich 1972, Los Angeles 1984. — Armed police, live on German television, drop onto the roof above the apartments where the Israeli Olympic team are being held hostage. — Lionel Richie takes fiesta to the closing ceremony. Perfection, Montreal 1976: Rumanian teenager Nadia Comaneci on the beam — the first ever performance to be awarded a perfect score of 10. For Love of Brand and Country, Barcelona 1992. — The Dream Team, (left to right) Larry Bird, Scottie Pippin, Michael Jordan, Clyde Drexler, Karl Malone, receive their gold medals. — The view from the Montjuic Aquatics Complex. Welcome Home, Athens 2004. — The Hellinikon Olympic canoe and kayak centre, ten years after the games. — The Olympic Swimming Complex remains unused to this day. The Anti-Olympics, Vancouver 2010 and Rio 2016. — Aman protests near the newly opened Olympic tent village in downtown Vancouver. — Another family home in Villa Autodromo is demolished, under guard, to make way for the Olympic Park.  Introduction O Sport, pleasure of the Gods, essence of life! You appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence. Like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled. And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops And flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests. Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach Gold Medal Winner, 1912 Olympic Arts Competition Baron de Coubertin had long believed that sport was not antithetical to the arts, but a distinct and important component of a society’s cultural life. It therefore seemed natural to him, though not to many athletes and artists of the time, that the Olympic Games should also stage artistic, literary and musical competitions on the theme of sport. In the run up to the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, he made repeated attempts to persuade the Swedish hosts to stage such an event, but after consulting their own artistic community and finding them either baffled or antipathetic to the notion, they politely declined the offer. Unperturbed, the baron announced independently that there would be a competitive artistic strand to the 1912 games and sent out a call for entries to be posted to his own address, where, as far as one can tell, he alone served as the judging panel. In the poetry section, the prize went to Hohrod and Eschbach’s florid ‘Ode to Sport’. It certainly would have appealed to the baron’s own rather peculiar religiosity and overdramatic understanding of ancient and modern sporting history. Yet, in some important ways, they were absolutely right. The ancient world had its games, but the modern world played sport. Starting in the mid-eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century, in Northern Europe and the 2 INTRODUCTION United States, the majority of the sports we now play were codified from older games and recent experiments, or — like basketball and handball — invented completely anew. Unlike almost all pre-modern games, they were separated out from religious or local calendars, rituals and purposes, acquiring their own internal meanings and pleasures. Unlike the intense parochialism of the pre-modern world, these sports were given stable written form that allowed them to spread nationally and then globally, secured by the creation of modern rational bureaucracies to administer them. All of which meant that, at precisely the moment that the rise of industrial capitalism and militarism was making the world a harsher, more miserable, more instrumental place, they also fostered an alternative — the organized play of modern sport. Hohrod and Eschbach, as well as prolix poets, were names taken from two villages (Hohrodberg and Eschbach-au-Val, to be precise) close to the birthplace of Coubertin’s wife, and were thus, in addition, his rather obvious pseudonym. Having set up his own competition to which he submitted his own poem, which he then adjudged the winner, I think we must assume he rather liked it, but a century later time has not been kind to Coubertin’s words. Submitted in French and German, these versions of the poem have some tiny scraps of rhythm, form and rhyme, but the English translations read with the same ponderous pomposity as a school sermon. Given the sancti- monious tone of the words, this is perhaps its natural genre. For the most part, it is just an excruciatingly bad exegesis on the model of amateur gentlemanly sport, pioneered in the elite educational and military institutions of the West in the nineteenth century, where sport built the character and moral framework required to rule empires and their unwashed masses. It was this and only this group of athletes, and this kind of sport, that was getting the mountain tops of modernity glimmering. Thus not much can be salvaged of Coubertin’s ideological legacy, either from this poem or the world of gentlemanly sport from which it arose. Amateurism and its elite codes have been abandoned by the Olympics, and Coubertin’s deeply held belief that the games were primarily a spiritual affair and form of modern religion has been quietly forgotten in the Olympics’ transition from a gentleman’s club and neo-Hellenic athletic cult to a global bureaucracy that stages a secular commercialized celebration of a universal humanity. To my  INTRODUCTION 3 ear, just two stanzas of ‘Ode to Sport’ seem to still speak to us. First, in a quite uncharacteristic celebration of sport’s capacity to level social differences, to make talent and ability transparent in an other- wise unjust world, the baron intoned: O sport you are justice! The perfect equity that men strive for in vain in their social institutions rises around you of its own accord. Then, in a language that carries traces of sexual excitement and drug- induced states of ecstasy and alternative consciousness, he praises sport’s visceral and intellectual pleasures: O sport you are joy! At your behest flesh dances and eyes smile; * Blood runs abundantly through the arteries. Thoughts stretch out on a brighter clearer horizon. It was not quite Coubertin’s intention to create a global stage on which battles for equality and inclusion along the line of class, eth- nicity, gender, disability and sexuality might be fought out. Nor, even in his most ebullient moments, did he imagine the Olympic move- ment and its games as a place for collective delirium, reflection or laughter, but despite everything the Olympics continues to offer both. This book is primarily about how Baron de Coubertin and his peculiar vision of the sporting spectacle became the global norm and a global bureaucracy, but along the way it is the story of the athletes who strove for perfect equity and who made our flesh dance, ours eyes smile and our thinking expand. PUY i er ~ y Ai | - = e Babel oe i ae RP Fhe  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK: THE REINVENTION OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES ATHENS 1896 Where are all your theatres and marble statues? Where are your Olympic Games? Panagiotis Soutsos, 1833 It is clear that the telegraph, railways, the telephone, the passion- ate research in science, congresses and exhibitions have done more for peace than any treaty or diplomatic convention. Well, I hope that athletics will do even more... Let us export rowers, runners and fencers: there is the free trade of the future, and on the day it is introduced within the walls of old Europe the cause of peace will have received a new and mighty stay. This is enough to encourage your servant to dream now... to continue and complete, on a basis suited to the conditions of modern life, this grandiose and salutary task, namely the restor- ation of the Olympic Games Baron de Coubertin, 1892 Shes, iS er a Lx ye——- 5  ONE Baron de Coubertin’s 1892 speech may have been the most signifi- cant public call for the creation of a modern Olympic Games, but it was hardly the first. More than half a century beforehand, in his poem ‘Dialogues of the Dead’, the Greek nationalist publisher and ideologue, Panagiotis Soutsos, imagined the ghost of Plato speaking to the newly independent but devastated Greek nation. Now, finally free of Ottoman suzerainty, what was modern Greece? Where were its great spectacles, arts and athletics?! He was sufficiently fired by the thought to write to the Greek minister of the interior proposing that the Greek state should revive the ancient Olympics, rotating the games every four years around a distinctly modern nationalist circuit of locations: Athens, the new capital city; Tripoli, in the heart of the Peloponnese; Messolonghi, a stronghold of Greek resistance during the war; and the island of Hyrda, which had provided key naval forces to fight the Turks.? Olympia itself, but for a few walls and columns, remained encased in silt. On this occasion, the meaning of the ancient games was bound to a Greek nationalist project, but for over 300 years, fed by the rediscovery and reanimation of the lost literature of antiquity, all kinds of Europeans had been reinterpreting the ancient Olympics, drawing on its imagery and language, even staging their own Olym- pian festivals that tied the Greek games, however anachronistically, to causes as diverse as the politics of pleasure in the English Counter- Reformation and the popular celebration of the French Revolution. In the sixty years between Soutsos’ poem and Coubertin’s address, there would be dozens more Olympic events, recreations and spec- tacles, now shaped by the emergence and globalization of modern sports and the actual excavation of Olympia itself. Soutsos was the first to call for a revival of the games, Coubertin was the first to bind that notion to some form of internationalism and make it happen, but both ideas emerged from a long and bizarre encounter between 8 THE GAMES European modernity and an ancient religious festival — already a millennium past when Columbus landed in the Americas — about which they and we know only fragments. Conventional Olympic histories have it that Roman Emperor Theodosius I banned the games by edict in 392 CE, and that over the next 200 years the sanctuary of Olympia was destroyed by a com- bination of neglect and fire. Earthquakes and river flooding in the fifth and sixth centuries left most of the site broken and then buried deep in alluvial silt. What structures remained were scavenged for stone and the metal braces and dowels that held the great columns together. The real target of Theodosius’ edict, however, was pagan practices, in particular those of the old polytheistic state religion of Rome: temples, oracles and sanctuaries, and the practices of de- votional offering and sacrifice to the old gods. The policing of the Theodosian code was hardly comprehensive, with the emperor’s military forces busy fighting both a civil war within the empire and a border war with the Goths. Rather than a sudden death, it is more likely that the games limped on in some reduced capacity, squeezed by a climate increasingly hostile to its central religious practices and associations. The Byzantine historian Lucian reported that ‘The Olympic Games existed for a long time until Theodosius the younger, who was the son of Arcadius’, suggesting that the Olympics finally expired under Theodosius II, around 436 CE.° By then, the heart of the games had been ripped out. According to George Kedrenos, the eleventh-century Byzantine chronicler, the gigantic gold and ivory statue of Zeus that sat in his temple at Olym- pia had been transferred to the palace of Lausas and finally perished around 475 CE in one of the huge urban fires that periodically swept Constantinople, but his Olympian cult was already dead. Lucian wrote, ‘After the temple of Olympian Zeus had been burnt down, the festival of the Eleans and Olympic contest were abandoned.” Earth- quakes and huge river floods in the middle of the sixth century finished the job.*® Once lost to the silt, the successive overlords of * Recent analysis of the sediments at Olympia suggests that they are far too thick to have been produced just by the Kladeos river that runs past the sanctuary. In fact, the composition of the sediment, which includes abundant remains of marine micro- organisms, suggests that Olympia was subject to catastrophic flooding caused by tsunamis — seabed earthquakes that sent huge waves of water up river and on to the sanctuary.  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 9 the Peloponnese — Byzantines, Franks, Ottomans and Venetians — paid the site no heed. For over a millennium, all that really survived of the Olympic Games were words, and they would await the Renaissance humanist scholars who rediscovered and compiled the work of antiquity. As the availability of books increased in the sixteenth century, in the original Greek, Latin and vernacular translation, key individual works with significant material on the games became easily available to the small but growing reading public. In England, for example, in the last quar- ter of the century alone there were translations of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Herodotus’ Histories and Homer’s Iliad. From the latter, and its account of Patroclus’ funeral games at the wall of Troy, interested readers would have known that athletics could be a sacred rite. From Plutarch they would have become familiar with Alexander the Great’s Olympic career, and from Herodotus they knew that Olympia offered glory — in its many varied and transferable forms — but not cash prizes.* Later readers would benefit, above all, from the brilliant, detailed first-hand accounts of Olympia and the games in Description of Greece by the second-century itinerant geographer Pausanias.° Modern Europe might still not have established quite why the Greeks played games or why they venerated them, but having read Pausanias, they could be in no doubt as to their importance: ‘Many are the sights to be seen in Greece, and many are the wonders to be heard; but on nothing does Heaven bestow more care than on the Eleusinian rites and the Olympic games.’ Writers were certainly tuning in. Composed in the early 1590s, Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3 has Prince George attempting to rally his Yorkist troops: And, if we thrive, promise them such rewards As victors wear at the Olympian games. A decade later, in Troilus and Cressida, the elderly Greek Prince Nestor describes his Trojan adversary, Hector, in battle: And I have seen thee pause, and take thy breath, When that a ring of Greeks have hemm/’d thee in, Like an Olympian wrestling * This fact left Herodotus’ Persians aghast: ‘Mardonius, what kind of men are these that you have pitted us against? It is not for money they contend but for glory of achievement!’ 10 THE GAMES In 1633, Michael Drayton hailed Robert Dover as the ‘great inventor and champion of the English olimpicks.” Drayton, a noted poet of the era, was just one of thirty-three contributors to Anallia Dubrensia, a collection celebrating Robert Dover’s Cotswold Games. Held since 1612 in the natural amphitheatre formed by Dover Hill in Chipping Camden, in the west of England, the Cotswold Games mixed pageantry and patronage, offered feasting, dancing, games, gambling and cash prizes for sports and contests. A mock castle was erected on the hill, and a large crowd gathered to watch hare coursing and horse racing, wrestling and shin kicking, stick fighting and hammer throwing. Dover was born in Norfolk in 1582, into the Catholic gentry in Elizabeth’s increasingly Protestant England. Educated at Cambridge, he practised law at Gray’s Inn in London before retreating to his small estate in the country. By all accounts a charismatic and charming man, a lover of festivities and mirth, he established and gave his name to the Cotswold Games as an act of both local patronage and national politics. Rural contests and fairs were widespread in Stuart England, local patrons quietly supporting them, but Dover took centre stage at his own games, made them considerably larger than other events and introduced proceedings dressed in the cast-offs of King James I. This was a very deliberate celebration of the king’s rule and his attitudes to popular pleasures and pastimes, which, given the steady rise of more mili- tant, ascetic and puritanical forms of Protestantism in seventeenth- century England, was a matter of pressing political importance. By the 1630s, puritan landlords and gentry were banning such activ- ities on their land and closing down rural fairs. The outbreak of civil war in 1642 and the defeat of the royalist cause in 1645 brought a halt to proceedings. Dover died in 1652 under Cromwell’s sternly ascetic Protectorate, and the games disappeared. There were a series of revivals after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but the olympick moniker was lost and Dover’s games, though always popular and boisterous, became ‘just another country drunken festival.’ The Cotswold Games may have lost their Olympic connection, but Olympia retained a place in Europe’s literary imagination and its popular cultures. Writing in the late seventeenth century, John Milton, in Paradise Lost, described the flight of Satan’s hordes as:  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 11 Part on the plain, or in the air sublime, Upon the wing, or in swift race contend, As at th’ Olympian games or Pythian fields More winsomely, Voltaire, during his short stay in England in the early eighteenth century, wrote that, on arriving at a sporting festival on the banks of the Thames, ‘I fancied that I had been transported to the Olympic games.” Friedrich Schiller, one of Germany’s enlight- enment polymaths, took the ancient games as an example of ‘play as an element of the beautiful’ in his Aesthetic Essays. From the sublime to the ridiculous: we find, in 1786, the London press reporting a ‘burlesque imitation’ of the Olympic Games in which the female con- testants were ‘placed on a platform, with horses’ collars to exhibit through.’ Over their heads were painted the words ‘The ugliest grin- ner shall be the winner’ and they were awarded a prize of a ‘gold-laced hat’. In 1794, The Times described a chariot race staged at Newmarket between Nanny Hodges and Lady Lads for the then indescribably large sum of 500 guineas as, ‘something like a revival of the Olympic Games to supply the turf gentry and the rapid decay of horse-racing’.*1° For another half century, popular — if not elite - knowledge of the Olympics was more likely to be garnered at the circus than in the library. As late as the 1850s, Olympic spectaculars and recreations on horseback could be seen in New York at Franconni’s Hippodrome, across Britain with Pablo Fanque’s travelling Circus Royal, and in Edinburgh at Madam Macarte’s Magic Ring and Grand Equestrian Establishment. Pablo Fanque, Britain’s first black circus master, and his ‘unrivalled equestrian troupe’ offered ‘new and novel features in the Olympian Games.’ Madame Macarte’s posters promised that, ‘the Extraordinary Evolutions of the Gymnastic Professors will forcibly * It is hard to imagine anything less like a revival of the ancient Olympic Games than the showdown at Newmarket; though gambling was not unknown at the ancient games, women and money prizes were entirely absent, and one staged the games in honour of Zeus rather than to promote the health of the horse-racing fraternity. The best of the eighteenth-century accounts of the games — like the English poet Gilbert West’s 1749 Dissertation on the Olympick Games and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s 1778 picaresque novel Travels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece — were based on a more systemic and scholarly reading of the ancient written sources than hitherto, and would have made at least this much clear. But why let details get in the way of a good show? 12 THE GAMES recall to the Classical mind the old Olympian Games.’ The most ambitious but least successful revivalist was the fabulously named Colonel Charles Random, a man of uncertain social origins and even more uncertain military career, who purchased the considerable grounds of Cremorne House in Chelsea, west London, and, in 1831, created ‘the stadium’ — or, to give it its full title, ‘The British National Arena for Manly and Defensive Exercises, Equestrian, Chivalric, and Aquatic Games, and Skilful Amusing Pastimes.’ In 1832, and again in 1838 to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria, he proposed staging his own Olympic Games. Sadly, it seems these efforts came to naught and the stadium’s main business for the next few decades was the fetes, fairs and spectaculars normal for a slightly risqué Victorian pleasure garden. For Europe to acquire a more rounded knowledge of the ancient games, and for their influence on the continent’s imagination to crys- tallize, something more than words was required. Someone needed to actually go to Olympia and take a look.  TWO Scholars, antiquarians, tomb raiders and treasure hunters had been poking around in the ruins of European antiquity since the fifteenth century. From the late seventeenth century onwards, they actually began to dig some sites up. Pompeii and Herculaneum were uncov- ered in the mid-eighteenth century. Napoleon’s military adventures in Egypt were accompanied by a vast scientific mission that, amongst other things, unearthed the Rosetta Stone. A growing band of antique collectors and serious Hellenic scholars had begun to wonder whether Olympia might be found and what it might yield. The French Benedictine monk and voracious antiquarian, Bernard de Montfaucon, wrote in 1723 to the Bishop of Corfu, whose diocese included the site of Olympia: ‘What wealth of treasures are thus buried underground. The strange thing is that I believe, nobody has ever thought of excavating on that site.’ Johann Joachim Winkel- mann, the singularly most important classicist of the eighteenth century and the central interpreter of Greco-Roman art and archi- tecture, was profoundly moved by the homoeroticism of the era’s sculpture and the culture of the gymnasium and the games. He made repeated calls to his patrons in the Vatican to explore Olympia, but to no avail. In any case, before digging could begin, someone from outside the western Peloponnese actually had to go to Olympia and see if anything was there at all. The task fell to Richard Chandler, the English antiquarian, who was charged by the Society of Dilettanti — a London club of aristocratic collectors and Greco-Roman art lovers — to travel through Greece acquiring objects, copying inscriptions and making illustrations of antique remains. In addition to buying a few fragments of the Parthenon in Athens, Chandler made his way to Olympia in 1766, where he was furiously bitten by insects and burnt by the sun. His sense of anticlimax on arrival was palpable: ‘We commenced our survey of the spot before us with a degree of expec- tation from which our disappointment on finding it almost naked 14 _ THE GAMES received a considerable addition.’ There were merely ‘scattered rem- nants of brick buildings, and the vestiges of stone walls.” Disappointing as this was, the Hellenists of western Europe at least knew how to get to Olympia and, in 1787, Louis Favel, com- missioned by the French ambassador to Constantinople, made the first topographical sketches of the site.* In 1828, a significant French expeditionary force had landed in the Peloponnese to support the Greek rebels in their war of independence with the Ottoman Empire. Like Napoleon’s great Egyptian expedition, though on a smaller scale, the military were accompanied by the Mission Scientifique de Morée — a collection of archaeologists, geographers, botanists and artists. Six weeks of work in 1829 allowed them to unearth a signif- icant part of the ruins of the Temple of Zeus, including a number of metopes. These carved marble tablets that formed part of the exterior of the building — illustrating the twelve tasks of Hercules — were whisked off to the Louvre in Paris, where they remain. Still, the five metres of silt that encased the temple, not to mention the clearly vast extent of the site, demanded something more systematic.” It took six years to finally excavate the temple but nearly twenty- five years for the German classicist, Professor Ernst Curtius, to make it happen. Two decades of complex diplomacy between Greece and Germany saw a deal finally agreed in 1874 in which the Germans would pay and dig, and the Greek government would keep the finds. Six years of work revealed not only the Temple of Zeus, but most of the buildings mentioned by Pausanias and the other key sources, like the Temple of Hera, the Echo colonnade and the Macedonian royal family’s very own temple of statuary — the Philippeion. The excava- tion of the entire site took another century, completed only in the 1970s when heavy-duty machinery was used to uncover all of the stadium and hippodrome. The physical record has been supple- mented by a century of scholarly work, situating the Olympic Games in a much broader understanding of the Hellenic world and its body and athletics cultures. Considerable disputes remain in interpretation, * Colonel William Leake, an experienced military cartographer, was sent by the Brit- ish government to survey the coasts of Albania and the Peloponnese as part of their shadow war against the French in the region. He found himself in Olympia in 1805 and conducted a full and accurate survey of the site, though it wasn’t until 1830 that it was published in his Travels in the Morea.  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 15 but what follows is a condensed account of our generation’s under- standing of the ancient games.° The Greeks themselves — conventionally, if very unreliably — dated the first ancient Olympiad to 776 BCE, but more than two centuries before this, the sanctuary of Olympia had been a place of religious worship and ritual. Indeed, there is some evidence of sacri- ficial rites from the Mycenaean age, half a millennium before. It seems more likely that the local games, initially organized under the aegis of the city state, Ellis, and possibly of funereal origins, were played in the eighth century BCE, and acquired a Panhellenic audi- ence and meaning in the seventh century BCE. This shift can be tracked by examining the geographical origin of Olympic champions. First they came from just the western Peloponnese, then from Athens and Sparta, and, from the sixth century BCE onwards, from Thessaly in northern Greece and the colonies of Sicily and Southern Italy. Olympia was then joined in a quadrennial circuit of athletic festivals by the Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian games, which confirmed the central place of athletic competition in Greek religion, culture and politics. Always polytheistic, many gods were celebrated there, but from the early fifth century BCE, the Olympics became synonymous with the cult of Zeus — king of the gods — and the Olympian Games became the first amongst equals on the circuit. The building of the Temple of Zeus, the largest and grandest in the inner sacred zone of Olympia, known as the Altis, was begun around 490 BCE. However, the building itself was entirely eclipsed around 430 BCE by the installation of Pheidias’ great Statue of Zeus. Considered by Herodo- tus to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it was a huge and imposing figure of marble, gold and ivory on a throne, a human-size Nike — the goddess of victory — held in one of Zeus’ hands. At the same time, the athletics stadium at Olympia, first laid down in the sixth century BCE, was shifted south and enlarged and joined by an enormous gravel-tracked hippodrome; both were surrounded by earthen banks that allowed them to accommodate at least 45,000 spectators. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the numbers involved at the games, for they consisted a significant percentage of the free- born men of the entire Greek world — perhaps 5 per cent — who would not only have had to travel considerable distances but would 16 THE GAMES have to endure considerable hardships in the harsh sun of a Greek August. For the very elite, there were villas and hostels. The Romans, as ever, added impressive infrastructure, including new hotels, Emperor Nero’s own personal villa, the great baths of Kladeos and the civic miracle of fresh running water. This was delivered by aque- duct to the great nymphaeum — a monumental multi-storey marble water-feature, built by the richest man in second-century Greece, Herodes Atticus. But, for the most part, there was hardship in the temporary tent cities that would spring up in the meadows around the sanctuary. Epictetus, as one might expect of a Stoic, thought it worth toughing things out: Are you not scorched with heat? Are you not cramped for room? Is not washing difficult? Do you not get your fill of noise and clamour and other annoyances? Yet I fancy that when you set against all these hardships the magnificence of the spectacle you will bear them.’ What drew such extraordinary crowds to the games was a com- plex mixture of motives drawn from the wider body cultures of the Hellenic and Roman worlds. For over 1,000 years, the gymnasium — the place where one goes nude — was the centre of civic and recre- ational life for the elite of free-born men, released from most practical activities by wealth, patriarchal families and slave labour. The precise ways in which civic responsibilities interacted with the athletic and physical work of the gymnasium varied. In some city states, athletics was a preparation for war, as all citizens were required to take up arms if required. In others, the relationship between physical health, mental health and civic virtue was empha- sized, and everywhere the cult of athletic male beauty meant that many Greeks thought that to look good was also to be good. Athletes and spectators alike were called to Olympia some months in advance by heralds that crossed the Hellenic world to announce the games. Indeed, the games continued throughout the bitter fighting of the fifth-century Peloponnesian wars. A five-day programme of events at Olympia was settled in the fifth century and remained unchanged until the second century, when the Romans conquered Greece. They rebranded Zeus as Jupiter, made it a six-day affair, and kept it that way until the games’ demise nearly six hundred years later. On the opening day, judges and offi- cials — the Hellanodikai — the athletes, their trainers and their relatives were all required to gather at the Temple of Zeus and swear  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 17 an oath, ‘that they would be guilty of no foul play and that they would be fair and not accept bribes.’ However, as the Zanes - a series of bronze figures that lined the route to Olympia’s stadiums — attest, there was plenty of cheating and plenty of bribery. These statues of Zeus were paid for by the fines levied on rule breakers, and served as an example to future athletes. There were also com- petitions amongst the trumpeters and heralds — the salpinktes and the keryx respectively — the winners of which would announce the athletes for the rest of the week and hail their accomplishments. The second day began with blood sacrifices at the many altars and temples around the site, then the crowd would move on to the hippodrome to watch chariot races (two- and four-horse variants) and simple horse-and-rider contests. Despite the perilous quality of these events, the prizes for the winners were awarded to the wealthy owners of the horses rather than their riders. Day three was reserved for the pentathlon, in which competitors ran, threw the discus and javelin, and jumped with weights in a manner no one was quite able to accurately capture. If no winner had emerged by this point (though on what basis that was determined remains unclear), there would be wrestling to decide the victor. Day four was given over to the festival of Pelops, the slaughter of a hundred oxen, and the boys’ athletic contests, accompanied by a great deal of feasting. On day five, it was back to the stadium for running and fighting. There were three races, with heats and finals of around twenty athletes each: the stade was a sprint down a single length of the stadium; the diaulos was the stade and back again; and the dolichos — literally the ‘long one’ — was run over twenty-four circuits of the arena, around 5,000 metres. Wrestling came in two forms: kato pale was a grasping, roiling-in-the-sand-pit version and orthos pale was a more formal, standing, grip-and-trip-based struggle. Boxing, recog- nizable to modern eyes, was conducted without gloves, though the Romans, bloodthirsty as ever, encouraged the introduction of knuckle- dusters. Finally came the pankration — literally, the ‘all power’ — a no-holds-barred fight that prohibited only biting and gouging of the eyes. The final day was given over to celebration: first, a parade of athletes, in which they were showered with twigs, cuttings and flow- ers; then the award of olive wreaths to the victors, cut from the groves of the Altis in the Temple of Zeus; and finally a sacred feast for the judges and the champions alone. 18 THE GAMES Much of this was known in Coubertin’s time, and much of his interpretation of the spiritual celebration of athleticism and the body, the glory of competition and the honour of endeavour and partici- pation, was successfully melded with his take on the Anglo-Saxon sports-and-education ethic. There was, of course, an enormous gulf between the two, but Coubertin’s attempt to bridge them was, if achingly conservative, unscholarly, romantic and patriarchal, at least plausible. What. will not stand is his reading of the ancient games’ relation- ship to amateurism and to politics. In the case of the former, the prohibition on professional participation in the modern games, and the incredibly strict definitions applied to the notion of amateurism, were justified and morally burnished for more than half a century by appeals to an imagined past. Avery Brundage, IOC president in the 1960s, could still argue, ‘The amateur code coming to us from antiq- uity embraces the highest moral laws.” In fact, although there were no cash prizes at Olympia, the games were set within an often highly professionalized and commercialized sporting culture. Beyond Olympia, there was a widespread circuit of athletic and sporting competitions all over the eastern Mediterra- nean, with prizes in cash and other goods. Participation in those races didn’t debar athletes from Olympia. Ambitious politicians, like the sixth-century Athenian, Solon, were known to offer rewards to champions on their return home. Five hundred years later, Mark Antony noted that Olympian laurels were regularly transmuted into exemptions from military service, tracts of land, pensions and tax breaks. Pausanias reported that a Cretan, Sotades, a champion in the long race at Olympia, appeared and won it the next time as an Ephesian, for the city had paid handsomely for his allegiance. Coubertin’s attempt to find classical precedents for his interna- tionalist and pacific modern Olympics also meant evoking a sporting culture that thought itself divorced from political power and political concerns. This is not how it appeared to the ancients. Herodotus thought that the Athenian Kylon, emboldened by his victory in the diaulos in 640 BCE, went on to launch a coup d’état at home. While Cimon, an Athenian aristocrat, exiled by the city’s ruler, Pisistratus, ‘happened to take the Olympic prize in the four-horse chariot... At the next Olympic games he won with the same horses, but permitted Pisistratus to be proclaimed victor, and by resigning the victory to  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 19 him he came back from exile to his own property under truce.’”* Other Greek tyrants that appear on the victory rolls of Olympia include Kypselis of Corinth and the Orthagorides of Sikyon. Perhaps more tellingly, as Coubertin would find out himself when he actually began to stage sporting spectaculars and rituals, Olympia was a space for politicians to be seen in. We see this in Plutarch’s account of the arrival of Themistocles — a fifth-century-BCE populist Athenian general — at the games: ‘the audience neglected the contes- tants all day long to gaze on him, and pointed him out with admiring applause to visiting strangers, so that he too was delighted, and confessed to his friends that he was now reaping in full measure the harvest of his toils in behalf of Hellas.” Olympia was always a place in which political capital could be generated and traded. As Couber- tin was to find out, it would be no different in the modern world; indeed, these features of the games would be amplified and magni- fied many times over.  THREE Europe’s classicists and scholars had preserved and interpreted the written record of the ancient games. Europe’s archaeologists and antiquarians had surveyed and excavated Olympia. Literature, the press and the circus had kept the idea of the Olympics in popular circulation. Yet none of them were actually playing games or con- necting the culture of ancient athletics to the new sports, gymnastics and physical education movements that were beginning to emerge in Europe; in fact, no ‘Olympic’ sporting festivals had been staged since the demise of Robert Dover’s Cotswold Games in the mid- seventeenth century. These connections were first re-established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany, France and Sweden, but the most successful and influential Olympic revival movements, and the ones that would actively shape Coubertin’s revivalism, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain and Greece, where the idea of the Olympic Games was bound to more powerful social forces: the emergence of the games ethic and the moral virtues of modern sport in the former, nationalism in the latter. The games had also acquired a new life, though one with a very different political meaning, in France, where their revival was pro- posed by Charles Gilbert Romme, a leading figure in the politics of the French Revolution. A member of the legislative assembly and a supporter of Robespierre, Romme’s key work was the creation of a new rationalized republican calendar, designed to excise royalist and religious references, and to embrace the decimalization of time and space that the new metric system was introducing. Five extra days were added to align with the solar year, and every fourth year there would be a leap day. Romme thought that the leap day might be a good occasion for staging public festivities and games: ‘we sug- gest calling it the French Olympiad and the final year the Olympics Year.’ It was a notion that found considerable support amongst republicans of all shades. Pierre Daunou argued, ‘let France adopt as  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 21 her own these brilliant solemnities. It is time to revive these salutary inventions: assemble there the exercises of all games, music, dancing, running, wrestling.’ In 1793, Georges Danton, then president of the Committee of Public Safety, spoke to the National Convention: ‘bear- ing in mind the Olympic Games, I request that the Convention give over the Champ de Mars to national games.’ Danton would soon lose his post and then his head, but the idea of games on the Champs de Mars would endure. In 1796, Paris staged a popular festival of sports and races, referred to as the Republican Olympiad, attracting crowds in the hundreds of thousands. Le Monitor reported that ‘they resembled those young Spartans who, gathered in the theatre for the Olympic Games, offered the assembled Greek population a shining example of the morals of the nation.’ They played ‘games, races, exercises full of movement and magnificence.’ Heralds dressed in republican red, white and blue announced competitions; military bands accompanied the races. A Parisian butcher won the wrestling, the long-distance race went to a sergeant major. Winners were wreathed in laurels, rewarded with French-manufactured goods — pistols, sabres, vases and watches — and paraded before the crowd. Two more Olympian festivals were staged, and there were even calls in 1798 to extend them, like the Revolution, to foreign neighbours. But by 1799 Napoleon was in charge and there was no more time for games until Coubertin’s inter- vention almost a century later to really ignite a serious and sustainable Olympic revival movement. As the dominant power of the era, the inventor and diffuser of innumerable modern sports and the crucible of the modern games ethic that saw sport as central to the emotional, moral and intellect- ual development of its elites, Victorian Britain might seem an obvious catalyst for reviving the games. However, it was not the public schools or Oxford and Cambridge universities, thick with aristocratic sports- men and classicists, that took on the Olympic idea, but Dr William Penny Brookes, a doctor and Justice of the Peace from the small Shropshire market town of Much Wenlock.’ In 1850, as a subsection of the Much Wenlock Agricultural Reading Society, he established the Wenlock Olympian Class, the purpose of which the inaugural minutes make clear: ‘the promotion of the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town... by the encouragement of outdoor recreations and by the award of prizes annually at public meetings for skill in athletic exercises and industrial attainments.’ 22 THE GAMES Later that year, the first Much Wenlock Olympian Games were held (and, but for two world wars, have continued ever since). Eclectic in every way, the games were part rural fair, part school sports day. They featured professionals and amateurs, men and women, locals and outsiders, and created events for the old and the very young. There was cricket, football, archery, hurdling and running, with very considerable cash prizes in the professional version of the events. Simultaneously, there were blindfold, wheelbarrow and sack races, donkey riding, blind man’s buff and, most popular of all, faux- medieval tilting at the ring. As the games grew more popular, Brookes added processions and pageantry, poetry competitions, shooting, cycling and an ever-changing and eclectic pentathlon. The odd clas- sical reference like this aside, Much Wenlock’s Olympian credentials were always rather thin, the name a mere gilding on what was a typical Victorian social enterprise that combined civic pride and patronage, rational recreation and entertainment, and Brookes’ gen- uine concern for the well being of the rural poor and the urban working classes. In 1860, Brookes wrote to the mayors of five local towns proposing that they combine forces to stage a Shropshire Olympian Games. These were held over the next four years, the big- gest attracting 15,000 spectators, until torrential rain washed out the 1864 games in Shrewsbury and a lack of civic enthusiasm closed them down. Civic enthusiasm was not in short supply at the Liverpool Athletic Club, founded in 1862 with the express purpose of nurturing amateur sports and the gentlemanly ethics of fair play, and instructing both the lower orders and the sedentary sceptics of the middle classes of the value of physical education.? The club’s moving forces were Charles Melly and John Hully. Melly, educated at Rugby College, a stronghold of the games ethic, was a busy philanthropist who endowed the city with drinking fountains, new parks and green spaces, and built outdoor gymnasiums. John Hully was a flamboyant, self-styled ‘gymnasiarch’, much given to eccentric costumes, who displayed immense enthusiasm for the moral and physical benefits of exercise. Both subscribed to Juvenal’s now familiar motto, mens sana in corpore sano — a healthy mind in a healthy body - and, in June 1862, they placed it at the head of an advertisement in the Liverpool Daily Post for their ‘Grand Olympic Festival’. Unlike Much Wenlock, the organizers did not offer cash prizes and places  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 23 for professionals, but silver and bronze medals for ‘gentlemen ama- teurs’ and ticket prices in the stands to match. The upmarket clientele was promised a steeplechase, gymnastics, fencing (sabres and broad- swords), wrestling and boxing, running, jumping and throwing the cricket ball; ‘no effort will be spared by the committee... to render the festival worthy of its immortal title.’ The Liverpool Grand Olym- pic Festival proved disorganized but immensely popular. Despite hapless scheduling and crowds that overflowed onto the playing fields, three annual festivals were staged, 12,000 spectators attend- ing the second one in 1863. The Liverpool Post wrote with glee, ‘If ever a name was fairly transferred from an ancient to a modern institution it is the case of those Olympic allusions by which the great athletic festivals of our day distinguish themselves from mere sordid sporting contests.’ The 1864 festival, held at the Zoological Gardens, proved less savoury, with the arrival of many professional athletes who were all refused permission to participate. Undeterred, they ran in an impromptu fringe of athletic races sponsored by local book- makers. The last energies of these English proto-Olympians coalesced in 1865 when a meeting was called in London with a view to forming a National Olympian Association (NOA), attended by, amongst others, John Hulley and other representatives from Liverpool, Dr Brookes, and Ernst Ravenstein of the London-based German Gym- nastic Society. The NOA was envisaged as an organization that could ‘bring into focus the many physical, athletic and gymnastic clubs that were spreading all over the country’, and stage national games open to ‘all comers’ — a category that did not include women or professionals, but on the matter of class origins, at least, it was neu- tral. London was the natural choice as the venue for the inaugural NOA games in 1866. The city, aside from its huge population and potential audience, held most of the nation’s key sporting organiza- tions — like the MCC and the newly formed FA — as well as serving as home to many of the leading aristocratic sportsmen. Neither responded well to the formation of the NOA or the call to attend its games. The idea that this collection of provincial nonentities and a German gymnast could establish organizational and symbolic con- trol over sport was simply unthinkable. An alternative organization, the Amateur Athletics Club (AAC), was quickly established, although it was noted that its ‘prospectus, published in February 1866, bears 24 THE GAMES signs of having been cobbled together over Christmas with no more purpose than to thwart the National Olympian Association.” To make their opposition clear, the new sporting elite held their own national championships in the elegant gardens of Beaufort House in west London, charged the astronomical price of a guinea for entrance and ruled that anyone who had participated in an open competition or the NOA games would be ineligible to compete at theirs. The National Olympian Games proved more demotic, with 10,000 spectators watching the athletics at Crystal Palace in 1866 and similar numbers going to watch the swimming, racing and gym- nastics in Birmingham in 1867. This was the high water mark of the British Olympic revival movement. Disconnected from and at times actively opposed by the sporting elites of London and the universities, this alliance of pro- vincial enthusiasts and philanthropists had neither the money nor the political capital to forge an enduring and successful sporting spectacle or movement. In 1868, unable to get any significant sport- ing club in one of the major cities to act as hosts, the games shrank back to a more Wenlockian affair held in the Shropshire town of Wellington. Two further Shropshire games were held in 1874 and 1875, but they could no longer be considered national in any sense. At the same time, the AAC consolidated its hold over national ath- letic events and turned itself into the Amateur Athletics Association (AAA), which came to run the sport nationally. The final NOA games, held in 1883 in the tiny village of Hadley, north of Much Wenlock, were microscopic. Dr Brookes and the Much Wenlock games themselves endured, and Brookes continued to campaign for the British government to support popular physical education, and to correspond with the Greek authorities and others about the pos- sibility of staging a revived Olympic Games, but for a long time his reach and influence was nugatory. In Britain, the presence of the Olympics shrank back to just the small north-eastern town of Morpeth, where, from 1870 through to the beginning of the First World War, the Morpeth Olympic Games were staged -— a more urban, drunken, raucous and commercial version of the Much Wen- lock games, without the faux-classical pageantry or even a modicum of its Hellenic pretensions. Hellenic pretensions carried a lot more weight in modern Greece. As we have seen, the first call for the revival of the games came from  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 25 the poet Panagiotis Soutsos in 1835, just a few years after Greece had won its independence from the Ottoman Empire. Soutsos’ most important convert to the cause was the fabulously wealthy shipping magnate Evangelos Zappas.° In 1856, seeking a nationalist legacy for his fortune, Zappas wrote to King Otto proposing a revived Olympic Games to be held in a renovated Panathenaic Stadium in central Athens (built in around 300 BC but long ruined), with prizes for the winners, all paid for by a very considerable financial bequest. Foreign minister Alexander Rangavis, who thought this interest in sport incomprehensible, replied that money might be better spent on a permanent building that could house a quadrennial exhibition of Greek agricultural, industrial and educational advances, with a single day reserved in the programme for athletic games and amusements. A deal was agreed in 1858, and in 1859 the first ‘Zappas Olympic Games’, as they were locally known, were held. They were, however, just a small component of Rangavis’ month-long programme of agri- culture exhibitions, displays of manufacturing innovations, and art and drama competitions. Held in a cobbled city square in Athens over three Sundays, there was running, horse and chariot races, discus and javelin competi- tions modelled on the ancient sources, as well as the climbing of a greasy pole. The games were opened by the king and queen, medals bearing the words ‘First Olympic Crown’ were issued and prizes were plentiful. The crowds appear to have been large, and athletes came from across the Greek-speaking world to attend, but the organization was poor. Few spectators could actually see much of the events and, when the crowd pushed towards the front, the local press reported that one policeman ‘who was supposed to keep order showed so much incompetence that his horse ran every which way and hit men and women.” A more contemptuous columnist thought ‘there never was a more ridiculous affair than the comedy that took place in the Plateia Loudovikou; and one would truly err if we were to term it Olympic Games.” In 1865, Zappas died, leaving much of his huge fortune to the continuing task of reviving the games. King Otto was now in exile; he had been replaced in 1862 by George I, a teenage Danish prince who was the choice of the Concert of Europe and the Greek elite. An enthusiast for sports, and conscious of his limited Hellenic creden- tials, King George readily backed the staging of a second games in 26 THE GAMES 1870, once again as part of a bigger agro-industrial festival. Using just a portion of the Zappas bequest, the Panathenaic Stadium was rebuilt, if not yet clad in marble, a small grandstand was erected, and considerable travel expenses and prizes were offered to athletes trav- elling from all over the Greek-speaking world. There was also more symbolic borrowing from antiquity, with competitors asked to take a formal oath and announcements by heralds. The games began with the singing of an Olympic hymn, and champions received laurel wreaths. They were deemed by most Greeks a great success and attracted a crowd of 30,000, but some, like Philip Ioannou, an aris- tocratic classicist and a member of the organizing committee, were appalled by the presence of athletes from working-class backgrounds — like Troungas, the pole-climbing champion and stone cutter — and despaired at the absence of ‘well educated youth’. At the next games, in 1875, the organizer and gentleman gymnast Ioannis Phokianos ensured that only athletes from the ‘higher social orders’ would be allowed to compete. Potential athletes would have to attend Phoki- anos’ own gym for two months, having applied through their university. This ensured the games were full of ‘young men from the cultured class... instead of the working class men who had come to the first two Olympiads.’ Despite the glee in the press that the games would be ‘much more respectable’, they were a disaster. The stadium was entirely unfit for competition, the spectators had to pull up thorn bushes and move rocks to find space to sit, and the mood of the crowd, already restless due to the hapless organization of events, was made worse by long and unintelligible speeches by Phokianos. Not surprisingly, the Zappas Olympic committee kept a rather low profile for the next decade, spending its time and nearly all of Zappas’ money on building the magnificent Zappeion: the long- promised neoclassical exhibition-hall-cum-temple, completed in 1888. They proposed a fourth Zappas games, but the committee never really had its heart in it. Revivalism survived in the form of the newly formed Panhellenic Gymnastic Society — the centre of aristo- cratic sport in Athens — which held its own small Panhellenic games in 1891 and 1893, and attracted both King George and Crown Prince Constantine as spectators and patrons, and, in 1890, Constantine had gone so far as to sign a royal decree announcing that a four-  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 27 yearly cycle of Greek Olympics would begin again in 1892. But if the Greek monarchy and its allies wanted to revive the games, they were going to need support from somewhere else.  FOUR Pierre de Coubertin’s body lies in Lausanne, his heart was buried at Olympia, but he was born in France and definitively shaped by the travails of its Third Republic. Born in Paris in 1863 as Baron Charles Pierre Fredy de Coubertin, he was the fourth child of a long-established French aristocratic family. Coubertin would have taken his first communion in 1870, the year of the disaster of Sedan, when the Prussians captured the Emperor and put the French army to flight in the early stages of the short-lived Franco-Prussian War. After the fall of Paris in 1871, the victorious armies of the now- united German Empire imposed a peace treaty, withdrew and took Alsace-Lorraine and almost every last vestige of French national confidence with them. With the Emperor in exile and the old order utterly discredited, the French Third Republic was established. Cou- bertin’s parents marked him out for a career in the priesthood and, in 1874, sent him to the Jesuit college Saint Ignace. With very few concessions to the nineteenth century, the packed curriculum con- centrated on monastic ritual and pious devotion, intensive study of Greek and Latin, and special classes in rhetoric. ‘From Latin one went to law; from rhetoric to drawing-room conversation; to speech making in the general council to political life.’ All of this was ani- mated by creating an atmosphere of competitiveness amongst the students: stimulating rivalries by publishing and comparing results; offering prizes to the best and, in conscious emulation of the classical balance of mind and body, encouraging fencing, riding, boxing and rowing, in all of which Coubertin was an active participant. Draconian as a Jesuitical education might have been, it could hardly compete with the huge economic, social and technological changes sweeping through the Third Republic in the shaping of its students. Paris was the great cosmopolitan laboratory of the belle époque, the most important node in the European and global net- works of art, philosophy, literature, music and design, and home to a  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 29 whole series of great universal exhibitions and world fairs. By the time Coubertin had left school, the outwardly conformist schoolboy had decisively broken with the key beliefs of his parents and much of his social class, rejecting a career in the priesthood and politically becoming un rallie — an aristocratic supporter of the Republic. Cou- bertin enrolled at the Ecole Libre — an elite school of the new social sciences and public administration, and home for internationalists, pacifists and progressives of all sorts — where he took a whole variety of classes as they pleased him. It was an intellectual atmosphere of experimentation and iconoclasm that suited him well. But, useful as studying was, Coubertin clearly yearned for something more in keep- ing with his status as an aristocrat, a man of standing in the world. Perhaps the best insight into Coubertin’s state of mind in the early 1880s can be found in his Roman d’un Rallie, a very thinly disguised semi-autobiographical novel in which an unbearably syrupy love story and picaresque travelogue provided the framework for Coubertin’s memoirs and his social and moral commentary.” The central charac- ter, Etienne, is a young aristocratic man struggling to find his place and purpose in the world: ‘Etienne was sick from being pushed towards action and not being able to act. Action, he saw it every- where, in the most varied and attractive forms. What he subconsciously sought in his private studies were motives for action.” For most of the 1880s, Coubertin was a man in search of both a role in the world, but also a grander and higher mission and purpose. Self-education was part of the solution, but the key for Coubertin was travel — the privilege and expectation of any aristocrat with scholarly pretensions — and it was his time in Britain and the United States that allowed him to focus his interests in sport, educational reform and national development. Coubertin stood in a long tradition of French travellers and writers who had visited Britain. He was both anglophile and anglo- phobe, a division that often turned on the author’s attitude to the nation’s aristocracy: was it a bastion of monarchism and worthy traditions or an increasing anachronism? Coubertin was no monar- chist, nor did he wish to become an anachronism, as he scornfully described some of his class, ‘imprisoned in the ruins of a dead past.’ But an alternative position was available. Amongst the most well- read travelogues of the era, one Coubertin was very familiar with, was Hippolyte Taine’s Notes on England.* His account of the British 30 THE GAMES aristocracy thought the ‘nobility... as citizens are the most enlight- ened, the most independent and most useful of the whole nation.’ What made them this way? In 1883, he swept through Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Harrow and Rugby. By 1887, he had Christ’s Hospital, Charterhouse, Marlborough, Wellington, Westminster and Winchester under his belt. On this question, Coubertin’s most import- ant literary guide was an English-language copy of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days. He claimed to have carried it ‘on all my peregrinations through the public schools of England the better to help me bring them to life again, in order to understand it.’ Indeed, his times in England, and the book that followed in 1888, [Education Angleterre, are best understood as a series of glorious confirmations of his own reading of Tom Brown, rather than as a critical or reflec- tive examination of what was in front of him. Amongst the bestselling books of the nineteenth century, Tom Brown was an amalgam of sententious memoirs and wishful thinking on the part of its author — Thomas Hughes, a pupil at Rugby in the 1840s — which came to define the meaning of the public-school experience of the games’ ethic for generations. On close reading, its ponderous didacticism, moral pomposity and cloying sentimentality is occasionally shot through with more subversive meanings — a barely concealed homo- eroticism, flashes of real human warmth and a disdain for the cruel and violent excesses of these appalling institutions — but Coubertin was never a man for close reading. Coubertin argued that the ‘supreme goal of the English masters is to make men to lead them.’ As to how they managed this, the answer was simple: ‘All who I questioned on the subject were unanimous in their answers; they have only to rejoice in the state of school morality, and they loudly declare that sport is the cause of it.’ Coubertin fervently believed that all of this was the work of Thomas Arnold the reforming headmaster of Rugby school from the 1820s, which was inevitably the site of his own famous epiphany: ‘In the twilight, alone in the great gothic chapel of Rugby, my eyes fixed on the great funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed, I dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire.” Whether this account of Arnold’s influence and Coubertin’s own time at Rugby is ‘consciously created myth” or a form of ‘deep and multiple determined wish fulfilment’, as his biographers have argued, it was certainly inaccurate.* In actual fact, Arnold was almost entirely  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 31 indifferent to sport; at best, he was reported watching games from the sidelines, but he was neither a participant nor an advocate. Rather than games, his educational revolution began with the in- culcation of religiosity as the precondition of creating Christian gentlemen. While this was accomplished, in part, by paying a little more attention to the moral and emotional well being of students than had been the norm hitherto, discipline and order were equally paramount. Arnold was, at the time, obsessed with the innate sinful- ness of boys. His regime made liberal use of corporal punishment, as was the norm in England, and the well-known abuses of the fagging system continued through the century. Coubertin managed to airbrush most of this from his account. In fact, the sporting traditions of both Rugby and other public schools were the creation of a younger generation of schoolmasters, who, though they took their lead from Arnold, found games were by far the most effective mechanism for controlling their charges and moulding their moral outlook and behaviour. Team sports, above all, offered an arena for the cultivation of a manly physique and gentle- manly disposition. Competitive but not cut-throat, they inculcated respect for authority and the rule of law without crushing individ- uals. The wider athletic culture aspired to the Hellenic virtues of a balance between mental and physical health. Above all, it reserved a place for glory and honour, bravery and valour. Coubertin’s distillation of the public-school games ethic, moulded by this generation of teachers and the muscular Christians of the second half of the nineteenth century, like Charles Kingsley, would in time form a core component of his syncretic notion of Olympism. In the late 1880s, he deployed it to argue for the profound reform of French education, and not just for the elites, but for the masses too. He certainly thought that the English model and its focus on team sports and ball games was preferable to the regimented gymnastics of the German Turnen tradition. Many in France had looked to Prus- sia, its traditions of nationalist gymnastics, drill and military success, and called for the transformation of French physical education and the armed forces on German lines. Coubertin, by contrast, argued, ‘It is citizens more than soldiers that France needs. It is not militarism that our education needs, but freedom.” Coubertin had his cause, but now he sought action; in 1888, he helped form and run the General Committee for the Propagation of 32 THE GAMES Physical Exercise in Education, fronted by the ex-prime minister and, by then, an elderly republican statesman, Jules Simon. The organi- zation was an educational policy campaign, a tribune for the virtues of amateur sports and a bureaucratic organization putting on athlet- ics, football and rugby tournaments. In 1890, it fused with a smaller competitor to create the USFSA (Union des Societies Francaises de Sports Athletiques). Too anglophile for more extreme nationalist tastes, opponents, like socialist and science-fiction writer, Paschal Grousset, created the Ligue Nationale de LEducation Physique, and railed against the importation of English games and manners. Grous- set even called for the creation of a national French version of the ancient Olympic Games. Amazingly, just three years before he would launch his own brand of revivalism, Coubertin was dismissive of the notion, even a little contemptuous. ‘Grousset’s ligue makes a great fuss. It sets out at war, it has reminiscences of the Olympic Games and visions of ceremonies at the foot of the Eiffel Tower where the head of state will crown the young athletes with laurel. And then at the very time they talk about military defence, they declare they do not want to exert political action... This is all a lot: it is even too much.”!° Yet this is precisely what Coubertin would go on to create, and the revival of the Olympic Games would become, for him, the cause of all causes, combining innumerable personal and political, sporting and intellectual strands in his life. In his own fantastically unreliable memoir, published in 1908, Coubertin was vague about when and how he came up with the idea of reviving the ancient games. Certainly this early episode of scepticism was edited out of the story. Indeed, the baron went on to rewrite his own intellectual biography to make himself appear a lifelong dreamy Hellenophile. ‘When and how the need associated itself in my mind with the idea of reestablishing the Olympic Games I couldn't say... 1 was familiar with the term. Nothing in ancient history had made me more of a dreamer than Olympia. This City of dream... raised its colonnades and porticos unceasingly before my adolescent mind. Long before I thought of drawing from its ruins a principle of revival, I would rebuild it in my mind, to make the shape of its silhouette live again.”"! While there is no doubt that Coubertin’s Jesuit education would have ensured that he was familiar with some of the classical texts on the games, and he was probably aware of some of the information emerging from the German excavations at  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 33 Olympia too, there is little sign in his records, bookshelves or notes that he took an abiding interest in the subject, or that he had made any significant connection between the ancient games and his edu- cational-reform work, or his increasingly internationalist frame of mind. In fact, the most likely explanation for his volte-face, at the very least the catalyst for change in Coubertin’s mind, was his encounter with Dr Brookes and the Much Wenlock Olympics. In early 1889, Coubertin had put out a call through the columns of English newspapers for correspondents who would care to com- municate on the matter of physical education. Dr Penny Brookes was one of his respondents, sending a steady stream of Olympic-related letters, cuttings and reports to Coubertin. The baron clearly took note and, later that year, in a speech at the International Congress on Physical Exercise — his contribution to the Exposition Universelle, held in Paris in 1889 — he praised Brookes’ ideas and initiatives, directly quoting a speech he had made at the 1866 National Olym- pian Festival in London: ‘How can one not agree with the words uttered by a perspicacious speaker at an athletic contest which took place some twenty years ago at Crystal Palace?’ Interestingly, Cou- bertin made no direct reference to the Olympian aspect of the event. In his later correspondence with Brookes, which deals in some depth with the virtues and promise of integrating physical education into the nation’s curriculum and resulted in an agreement to attend the Much Wenlock games in October 1890, the issue of the ancient Olympics did not arise. On the eve of his arrival, Brookes thought the purpose of the exercise was merely ‘to enlighten Baron Pierre de Coubertin who desires to introduce athletics more largely among his own countrymen.’ The town had already held the games, as usual, in May that year, but this was a special performance. The sport really wasn’t much to write home about, but Brookes went big on pageantry. Competitors arrived in elaborate costume and processed through a stage-set triumphal arch bearing the words, ‘Welcome to Baron Pierre de Coubertin and Prosperity to France.’ The baron was asked to plant an oak tree, and they bathed the sapling in cham- pagne. The field was decorated with banners in ancient Greek, quoting the classics. The games themselves were short: eclectic track- and-field events were followed by tilting at the ring and an elaborate faux-medieval prize giving, then on to a grand dinner. Brookes made Coubertin an honorary member of the Wenlock Olympian Society; 34 THE GAMES Coubertin made his host an honorary member of the USFSA. They also had some time alone, the doctor introducing the baron to his scrapbooks, his Olympic-revival archive and correspondence, and his personal library — and, in the course of this, the history of both his National Olympian Association, the various Zappas revivals and his own subsequent exchanges with the Greeks. Something must have clicked. On his return to France, Coubertin wrote an article entitled ‘Les Jeux Olympiques a Much Wenlock — Une Page de LHistoire de Athlétisme’. ‘What characterizes it is the veil of poetry that envelops it and the scent of antiquity which comes from it. Dr Brookes, more keenly than any other has sensed the mysterious influence that Greek civilization, across the ages, still exerts on humanity.’° Coubertin made it plain, as he would never do again: ‘If the Olympic games which modern Greece could not bring back to life are revised today, the credit is due not to a Greek but to Dr Brookes.’  FIVE It seems indisputable that it was only in the months after his visit to Much Wenlock, that Coubertin became an Olympic revivalist. In the process, he would draw widely on the ideas and experiments of his predecessors, though he rarely ever acknowledged them, but he was no mere jackdaw. In the eighteen months between the publication of his Much Wenlock article and his 1892 speech at the Sorbonne, where he first proposed an Olympic revival, he forged a unique ver- sion of the modern games. Moreover, unlike his predecessors, he would be able to create an international social and political coalition that could make it happen. Perhaps Coubertin’s greatest advantage was his capacity to think big. In the 1790s, the French revolutionaries had called for the new European republic to join them at their Olym- piad. In the 1860s, the NAO had asked for, though not received, applications from overseas athletes to join them. The Much Wenlock games were irredeemably provincial, the Zappas games were played for just a Greek audience and tied to a Greek cause, and though both were able to draw upon the nascent sports cultures and clubs of their time, neither was able to tap into the aristocratic networks of athletic prestige, cultural capital and political influence. Coubertin, by contrast, fused his Olympic revivalism with the most universal call of all — internationalism — envisaging the games not as a recreation or country fair, but as a grand, if restrained, urban cosmopolitan spectacular, and he had the personal connections and ideological appeal that could tie the revival of the Olympic Games to the gentlemen athletes of the industrialized world. Although he had rejected a career in diplomacy, one of the few avenues open to him, Coubertin’s social rank and connections made him a natural part of the world of international affairs. Since the establishment of the Concert of Europe at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the crowned heads of Europe had been increasingly in the habit of calling conferences amongst themselves and meeting face to 36 THE GAMES face.! Only semi-institutionalized as a system of international diplo- macy, it was never entirely clear who amongst European royalty was entitled to call a conference, or on what subject, and over the course of the nineteenth century, the practice spread to both obscure mon- archs and even to more junior members of the European aristocracy, concerned with everything from the global protection of intellectual property to the rules of war and the building of the Suez Canal. Not only did Coubertin have access to these kinds of networks, but he was, through his travels and his growing body of correspondents, connected to some of the key sports associations, universities and elite athletics clubs in Europe and North America. As we shall see, the most effective way of mobilizing these forces was on the question of amateurism in sport and then the common task of international congresses — to discuss, propose and try to set international norms in their field of expertise. However, as is clear from the new language and arguments of the baron after 1892, ama- teurism was not an animating force for him, but a mere means to an end. More important was the cause of internationalism, pacifism and peace amongst nations, ideas he first encountered at the Ecole Libre and which were part of the heady intellectual mix of Parisian society. It is notable that the honorary supporters of the 1894 congress to revive the games, which Coubertin would go on to hold, included, alongside a collection of cosmopolitan royalty, all the leading figures of the nascent international peace movement, centred on Paris.” This world of international associations and conferences intersected with the key nodes in the global networks of cultural exchange in the belle époque — the world fairs that had begun with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and had recently peaked in scale and influence with the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, at which Coubertin had spoken. The lectures and small displays of Swedish Ling gymnastics that Coubertin helped arrange at the fair brought international sport to the periphery of these new global spectaculars and their grand interpretations of modernity. In 1891, the imperialist agitator John Astley Cooper made the next leap. Writing in Great Britain: The Imperial and Asiatic Quar- terly, he proposed an international sporting spectacular that could stand on its own: ‘A Pan-Britannic-Pan-Anglican Contest and Festival every four years as a means of increasing goodwill and good under- standing of the British Empire’, uniting the motherland, the white  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 37 dominions and the colonies. Coubertin followed the same line of thought, but with more cosmopolitan intentions.’ There was a final component to the mix. Coubertin had, of course, made pragmatic arguments for playing sport and introducing it into schools — like the creation of gentlemen, the national benefits of a healthy population, and the moral and political arguments for playing them internationally — but these ideas would have only made the case for the staging of secular international sporting festivities, like the Pan-Britannic games. To revive the ancient games, even - under modern conditions, was to enter the realm of the sacred. Fond of quoting Pindar, who thought that ‘The gods are the friends of the games’, Coubertin recognized and was greatly attracted to the indel- ibly religious character of the ancient Olympics. Indeed, he thought the ancients, on observing modern sports, ‘would be astonished to find no expression or suggestion of the religious idea of purification and sanctified action.”* However, in actual fact, ‘like the athletics of antiquity, modern athletics is a religion, a cult, an impassioned soar- ing which is capable of going from play to heroism.” The Catholic aristocrat, searching for glory and heroes, marooned in an increas- ingly demotic and secular world, had found his vocation, his gods and a stage on which to venerate them.  SIX In November 1892, less than two years after his time in Much Wenlock, Coubertin assembled a trio of speakers at the Sorbonne, at a conference held to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the foundation of the USFSA. Georges Bourdon, the theatre critic and one of the founders of Racing Club de Paris, the French capital’s leading sports club, spoke on ancient sport; the diplomat and writer Jules Jusserand covered chivalry and medieval sports; and then Coubertin was billed to speak on modern sports. ‘International competitions’ was his theme: It is clear that the telegraph, railways, the telephone, the pas- sionate research in science, congresses and exhibitions have done more for peace than any treaty or diplomatic convention. Well, I hope that athletics will do even more... Let us export rowers, runners and fencers: there is the free trade of the future, and on the day it is introduced within the walls of old Europe the cause of peace will have received a new and mighty stay. This is enough to encourage your servant to dream now.. to continue and complete, on a basis suited to the conditions of modern life, this grandiose and salutary task, namely the restor- ation of the Olympic Games. Initial responses were not good. Coubertin recalled, ‘Naturally I had foreseen every eventuality except what actually happened. Opposi- tion? Objections? Irony? Or even indifference. Not at all. Everyone applauded... but no one had really understood.”! Some in the audi- ence, thinking the whole thing an elaborate pageant, joked as to whether the athletes would be naked. Undeterred, Coubertin looked for other opportunities to make his pitch and, in 1893, Adolphe de Pallisaux, an amateur walking champion and the treasurer of Racing Club, offered him one. Pallis- aux suggested the USFSA host an international conference on the  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 39 principles and problems of amateurism in the sporting world — an issue perplexing elite and aristocratic athletes all across the industri- alized world as they attempted to keep the new industrial classes out of their games and clubs, simultaneously preserving the social exclusivity and moral purity of their version of sport. Coubertin seized on the opportunity, actively supporting the pro- posal and suggesting that his Olympic idea might also form a small ~ element of the discussions. In a letter sent out in January 1894, Coubertin invited the sporting world to the International Congress of Amateurs. The first seven items on the proposed agenda concerned the definition of amateurism, issues of broken-time payments, pay- ment of gate money and methods of disqualification. Sneaking in at number eight was ‘The possibility of re-establishing the Olympic Games. Under what conditions would it be feasible?’ In the covering letter, Coubertin elaborated a little further, suggesting that, ‘the establishment of the Olympic Games on a basis and in the conditions in keeping with the needs of modern life would bring together, every four years, representatives of the nations of the world face to face, and one is permitted to think that these peaceful, courteous contests constitute the best form of internationalism.’ Initial interest was thin. Trips to the USA and to Britain in late 1893 failed to drum up any public support or interest, but, through the spring of 1894, the baron assembled the other essential compo- nents of the congress. Baron de Courcel, a French state senator and former ambassador to Berlin, was persuaded to act as a grand figure- head. Racing Club agreed to host a grand dinner and sporting fete for the guests. The letterhead of the congress was gilded by an enor- mous list of Coubertin’s correspondents: the King of Belgium, the’ Prince of Wales, the Crown Princes of Greece and Sweden, and the Russian Grand Duke Vladimir. Coubertin also knew how to cover his back, and invited the British imperialist commentator John Astley Cooper to be an honorary member of the congress. On the final set of invitations, sent out in a flurry in May 1894, the meeting was now known as the International Athletic Congress rather than the International Amateur Congress and the Olympic component was creeping up the agenda. It now comprised three items out of ten. Coubertin had also been working the Greek back-channels and, in the months before the meeting in Paris, secured two key allies. First, through the agency of Charles Waldstein, the archaeologist and 40 THE GAMES director of the American School in Athens, Greek Prince Constantine agreed to be an honorary member. The details of their conversations remain unknown, but it seems more than likely, given Constantine’s and the whole royal house’s enthusiasm for the Zappas games, and their own failed efforts to stage an Olympic festival in 1892, that they would have also been enthusiastic about hosting this version of the revival. Second, Coubertin acquired a Greek delegate to the congress who would be able to make the case for him that Athens should do so: the elderly Greek writer Dimitrios Vikelas, whose patriotic adven- ture story, Loukis Lara, set during the Greek war of independence, proved a bestseller at home and then a pan-European hit. Coubertin asked him to chair the committee that would deal with the revival of the Olympic Games. Coubertin’s congress, now retitled for the third time, was described in the official programme as the Paris International Con- gress for the Re-establishment of the Olympic Games. It had attracted seventy-eight delegates from sports clubs and organizational bodies, drawn mainly from France and predominantly from Europe (includ- ing Austria, Belgium, Britain, Bohemia, Greece, Italy, Russia, Spain and Sweden), with an unofficial German presence (still opposed by many prickly French patriots), a sprinkling of Americans and a single New Zealander. Proceedings opened in the great amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, where 2,000 members of the audience heard the recently discovered and translated ‘Hymn to Apollo’, a classical ode set to music by the composer Gabriel Fauré. Coubertin thought they lis- tened ‘with religious silence to the divine melody which lived again to salute the Olympic revival across the dimension the ages’, and that ‘Hellenism infiltrated the whole hall.” For most of those attending, the week was a round of social engagements and festivities: bicycle races and tennis competitions, grand dinner receptions with Parisian dignitaries and an evening fete at the grounds of Racing Club de Paris that combined athletic races, a high-society party and tremen- dous celebratory fireworks. Back at the Sorbonne, the two committees got down to work. At the opening session of the Olympic committee, there was a strong case made for London as the inaugural host, rather than Athens, but with his consummate committee skills, Coubertin persuaded the meeting to leave the question open until the end of the week, by which time support for a London games would have melted away  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 41 and, emboldened by a congratulatory telegram from the Greek king, Coubertin would have mobilized all his supporters. At the decisive moment in the final plenary discussions, Vikelas spoke to the con- gress, advocating an Athens games; ‘a Greek institution was being revived for which a Greek city was an appropriate host.’ Much to his surprise, Vikelas’ suggestions were warmly received and graciously accepted. The congress went on to confirm that the first games should be held in Athens in 1896, the next in Paris in 1900. Under the strict terms established by the congress’ other committee, they would be open only to amateurs, with the exception of fencing masters. The initial list of proposed sports was long, including athletics, aquatics, gymnastics, cycling, wrestling, equestrian sports, boxing, polo and shooting. In a splendidly offbeat note, Coubertin also insisted on a special prize being awarded for the most interesting mountaineering achievement accomplished since the last games. A permanent committee was established with Vikelas as its titular president and Coubertin as the general secretary. The rest of the members, effectively hand-picked by Coubertin, included middle- class educational reformers — like the Hungarian Ference Kemeney, the Czech Jiri Guth-Jarkovsky, and the Argentine Dr Jose Zubiau — but also senior military officers — like the Swede Major Victor Balck, and the Russian General Boutowsky — who were not only sportsmen, but active in integrating athletic training in their own armed forces. The British and Americans were well represented by Coubertin’s long-term confidant, Princeton professor of history, William Sloane, a patron of collegiate athletics; Baron Ampthill, later viceroy of India, who was a leading light in the Henley Regatta and Oxbridge rowing scenes; Charles Herbert, honorary secretary of Britains Amateur Athletic Association (AAA); and Leonard Cuff, captain of the New Zealand national cricket team. Coubertin later wrote that he formed the International Olympic Committee along the lines of the Henley Regatta, ‘composed of three concentric circles: a small core of earnest and hard-working mem- bers; a nursery of willing members ready to be taught; finally a facade of more or less useful people whose presence satisfied national pretensions at the same time as it gave prestige to the committee as a whole’; thus the first IOC was rounded out with a smattering of Italian and Belgian aristocrats and a little more glitter. 42 THE GAMES The congress may have finished on a high, but the award of the games was not received well by the Greek government. On his return to Athens, Vikelas met Prime Minster Tricoupis, who, he reported, ‘would have much preferred that the question of the Olympic Games had never arisen.’ His encounters with Dragoumis and the Zappas foundation were little short of disastrous, with their deciding to have no part in the games. The baron arrived in November and was met by a letter from Dragoumis which argued that there was no way, given the economic situation, that Greece could host the games, that in any case athletic sports were insufficiently developed in Greece and that he should start the ball rolling in Paris in 1900 instead. Greek prime minister, Tricoupis, paid him a visit in his hotel rooms and made the same arguments. Coubertin countered by arguing that a very small budget would be sufficient, perhaps as little as 250,000 drachmas. Then he went to work, gaining the full support of Prince Constantine, relentlessly handing out his business card, and speak- ing, cajoling and meeting with Athenian high society. Invited by supporters of the games to address the Parnassos Literary Society, he appealed to Greek patriotism: ‘Gentlemen, did your fathers carefully weigh their chances of victory before rising up against the Turks? If they had, you would not be here, free men this very moment.’ Sens- ing that there might be some concern, given the limited development of modern sports in Greece, that they would not fare well, he implored, ‘When we had begun to play football matches against the English, we expected to lose. But the seventh time we played them, we beat them... Dishonour here would not consist of being beaten; it would consist of not contending.” Despite official opposition, Coubertin was able to convene a meeting at the Zappion to discuss plans for the games. Dragoumis opened the meeting but departed immediately, refusing to have anything to do with the conversation. Coubertin had a few allies amongst the assembled Greek gentlemen, but most were active sup- porters of Prime Minister Tricoupis. Coubertin announced that Prince Constantine had agreed to act as honorary president, that the bill for the games really wouldn't be as much as they imagined, chose four vice-presidents and declared them the organizing committee of the 1896 Athens games. He then left for Paris by way of Olympia: ‘We arrived there late in the evening. I had to wait for dawn to see the outline of the sacred place of which I had so often dreamed. All  THIS GRANDIOSE AND SALUTARY TASK 43 morning long I wandered amongst its ruins.’> The lifelong Helleno- phile stayed just a morning before heading home. It was the first of only two visits to the site in his lifetime; the second would be in the 1920s and was hardly any more considered. His fleeting stays and rather hazy memoir suggest that Coubertin had already extracted what he needed and wanted from the ancient games, and no amount of archaeological science or close textual study of the sources was about to deflect him from the inspiration he had acquired or the vision he had established.  SEVEN One wonders quite how long Coubertin’s Olympian reverie lasted. It would not have been long after his return to France that the post would have brought news of the chaos in Athens. The committee that he had left behind, some of whom were not merely sceptics a