 Almost everyone reading has been involved in some kind of sports, whether it’s just your P.E. class or you competitively compete around the country. While soccer has a World Cup, and football has a Superbowl, what has all of the sports competitions combined into one? The Olympics! Every four years the annual summer and winter Olympics occur. During this time of year, it’s basically half of the news, and you may have heard all the gossip about it. However, the history of the Olympics goes much further back than all of that. In fact, the first Olympic games were estimated to take place in 760 B.C. in Ancient Greece. As you may have predicted, the games have changed quite a bit, and to some extent, a lot.
The first Olympic games took place in Ancient Greece, honoring the King of the Greek Gods, Zeus. According to www.olympics.org, the games were a very big deal. One of the most famous examples of that is when the Greeks had to delay training for the Persian war because so many people were going to compete in the Olympics. The Olympics were not just a sports event, it was a religious gathering which only men could attend. According to, olympic running, olympic pankration, olympic long jump, javelin, discus, olympic chariot racing, and olympic boxing, the activities in the ancient Olympics including boxing (which had almost no rules, weight classification, scoring system, time limit and no one really cared if you died), chariot racing (which is known to be the most dangerous sport invented by man), long jump, javelin, discus, pankration, running, track, and wrestling. Now, there was no determined winter or summer Olympics, but I’m pretty sure that the ancient Greeks weren’t skiing, or competing in beach volleyball. As you can see, the Olympics have evolved a lot throughout the years. Now, fast forward a couple thousand years and you arrive in 2018 where the twenty-third winter Olympics take place in PyeongChang, South Korea. In the present winter Olympics, the sports events have drastically changed from sports in Ancient Greece. Olympic sports says that there are six skiing events in the game, bobsleigh, curling, figure skating, ice hockey, luge, short track speed skating, skeleton (sled), snowboard and speed skating. Almost all the world’s greatest competitors come to together to perform in a top-notch competition. Anyways, if you do watch the winter Olympics in PyeongChang, just remember how far we have come in the process of competing. Story by Liv Suydam Sources: https://www.olympic.org/ https://www.olympic.org/ancient-olympic-games http://www.history.com/topics/olympic-games Source for pictures: http://blog.minitab.com/blog/the-statistics-game/analyzing-the-history-of-olympic-events-with-time-series http://olympics.nbcsports.com/2017/11/08/nbc-olympics-pyeongchang-military-programming/ Comments are closed.
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