Paris 2024 Olympic Games: how were the ancient Games born in Olympia, the Greek Olympic cradle?

The Paris Olympics come to life this Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 3,000 km away, in Olympia, Greece. There, in this Peloponnese which is home to the main sanctuaries in the South-West of Greece, lies the source of Olympism. Every four years, it is not a trickle of water but of smoke that brings it back to life. A high priestess will light the flame for the next Summer Games in front of the temple of Hera, using a parabolic mirror capturing the sun’s rays to guarantee the purity of the fire. For this she will implore the help of Apollo, god of light, then transmit the sacred fire to the first bearer of the flame. A gesture that will launch the long relay to Paris.

“The flame, an invention of the modern era”

However, all this folklore did not exist more than 16 centuries ago during the Olympia Games, as recalled by Éric Perrin-Saminadayar, professor of history and epigraphy of the Greco-Roman world and director of the Faculty of human sciences and environmental sciences at Paul-Valéry (Montpellier). “It is an invention of the modern era during the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928. In Olympia, the fire was only lit for the sacrifices made as a preamble to the sporting events. Because the big difference with today’s Games ‘today, it was then a religious celebration,’ he explains.

In fact, in Greece, the sacred fire burned permanently in each city within the home of Hestia. This was the case in Elis, the nearest city, and not in the sanctuary of Olympia itself. Another major difference, as the history professor recalls, “the main thing was not to participate but to win to show that we came from a powerful city. The winners were entitled to honors equivalent to those who “we gave to the gods, even going so far as to tear down walls to bring them into the city.” Where the current Games, now Paralympics, are intended to be those of inclusion, those of Olympia were those of exclusion: reserved for Greeks and forbidden to women. Only the Romans were accepted later.

As for the genesis of what was then called a “competition”, it is based on a myth: “That of a local king, Oenomaos, who had promised to marry his daughter to anyone who beat him in a chariot race whose defeated was put to death But as he had an invincible team, the suitor regularly lost his life until the young Pelops first seduced the daughter of Oenomaos, who gave him assets to beat his father. , with the help of the god Poseidon After winning the race and killing Oenomaos, Pelops, who will give his name to the Peloponnese, will decide to organize a great competition in Olympia to atone for his crime.

Only one winner

This competition was born in 776 BC. The first Games were played in a stadium without stands or embankments. But they marked a turning point in the history of Greece: “They serve as a bit of a year zero, like Jesus Christ for Christians. This period coincides with the moment when the Greeks began to explore the Mediterranean, where writing was reinvented with the Greek alphabet, where a kind of identity is created and competitions are an integral part of it.

The notion of an Olympic truce is then entirely relative. It only concerns athletes, pilgrims and followers, but the fighting continues between warlike cities. Like any religious festival, the Games began with a procession starting from Elis, 35 km away, and accompanying a hundred oxen to the sacrifice at the sanctuary of Olympia. “There was no podium or ranking, only one winner per event, specifies the historian. The sacred athletes received an olive wreath and a strip of linen or wool that they could hang on the temple dedicated to gods”.

“Bringing people together”

It is this religious dimension which pushed the Roman Emperor Theodosius in 393 to ban these Games which he considered pagan. In 426, the site of Olympia was buried under a layer of oblivion, then rediscovered in the 18th century. The Olympic spirit tried to rise from its ashes… “The first attempt dates from 1796-1798, during the French Revolution. There was another in England until the initiative of Coubertin which aimed firstly to implement before rather aristocratic elite sports”. They have since become more democratic, leaving the five rings to replace the gods on the altar of sport. But Éric Perrin-Saminadayar recalls that they “reinvented themselves as a means of bringing people together… The universal side of the Games remains but the political dimension is still very quickly catching up with that of sport, we see this with the war in Ukraine”. Another story, against a backdrop of a more truly sacred fire.