Classics Scholar: Modern Olympics, Like Ancient Ones, Rooted In Greece

July 8, 2004

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — When the summer Olympic Games begin in Athens next month, the event will mark a return not only to the games’ ancient roots but also to its modern ones.

So says a University of Florida classics professor who argues in a just-published book that the Frenchman long credited with originating the modern Olympics actually got the idea from, among others, a Greek philanthropist. Normandy native Baron Pierre de Coubertin assiduously promoted himself as the lone force behind the Olympics – and deliberately obscured the contributions of Evangelis Zappas and a handful of other, now mostly forgotten Greek and British advocates for the games, says David Young.

“He took an idea that others had been failing at, but working at for decades – he took that idea and claimed it as his own and made it work,” Young said. “The credit for the Olympics really goes to the good luck and hard work of several people.”

Young’s book, “A Brief History of the Olympics” was just published by Blackwell Publishing. It contains a history of the ancient Olympics as well as Young’s revisionist history of how the modern ones began. Young first presented his arguments about the origins of the Olympics in his 1996 book, “The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival.”

The first modern international Olympic games were held in Athens in 1896. Coubertin, a French aristocrat and physical education advocate who founded the International Olympic Committee, remains officially enshrined as the games’ sole founder.

“Coubertin was a very active sportsman and practiced the sports of boxing, fencing, horse-riding and rowing,” according to the committee’s Web site. “He was convinced that sport was the springboard for moral energy and he defended his idea with rare tenacity. It was this conviction that led him to announce at the age of 31 that he wanted to revive the Olympic Games.”

Left unsaid in this and other traditionalist histories, according to Young, is that Coubertin got his idea from several earlier proponents of an Olympic revival. Prominent among these were Zappas and British physician William Penny Brookes, both of whom organized national game festivals modeled on the ancient Olympics, Young said.

The Zappas Games of Athens began in 1859, four years before Coubertin was born. They were inspired by the writings of Panagiotis Soutsos, a Greek poet who saw the Olympics as a way of helping

Greece return to its pre-eminence in Europe, Young said. A British version of the national Olympic games were first held in London in 1866, he said.

Both featured ceremonies, rituals and competitions, such as foot races, wrestling, jumping and javelin throwing. Neither drew competitors from outside their native countries, but that hardly disqualifies them from Olympic status, Young said. “People will say, ‘Well if all the athletes in the Zappas games were Greeks then they weren’t international, and so they weren’t really Olympics,’ but then I’ll then I’ll ask, ‘Do you say the original ancient Olympics weren’t really Olympics either, because all of the participants were Greeks?’”

Although the games were held periodically, neither series persisted into the 1900s, Young said. That said, Brookes proposed holding International Olympic Games as early as 1881 and worked diligently to persuade Greek authorities to hold it in Athens through the early 1890s, Young said.

Young based his conclusions on exhaustive research of newspaper articles dating back over a century, correspondence, minutes of organizational meetings for early Olympic events and other primary sources in England, Switzerland and Greece. He said his research – which he launched after learning of the Zappas games while researching a book on the origins of amateur sports – shows that Coubertin not only knew about the British and Greek games but also maintained a long friendship with Brookes, whom he visited in England in 1890 and saw the “Much Wenlock” Olympics that Brookes developed.

Despite that, Coubertin’s “Olympic Memoirs,” never mentions a word about Brookes, Zappas, or either of the earlier British or Greek games.

“Coubertin never said anything bad about Brookes, but he wouldn’t admit what Brookes had done,” Young said. “Brookes died three months before the 1896 games, and by then Coubertin wasn’t even answering his (Brookes’) letters. And he denied in print that there had ever been any Zappas games.”

Alexander Kitroeff, an associate professor of history at Haverford College in Haverford, Penn., and the author of the just-published book, “Wrestling with the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics,” credits Young with being the first scholar to cement the important role of the pre-Coubertin Olympics.

“He’s the one that really documented these claims that the Zappas Olympics were an inspiration to Coubertin, and he was able to expose the fact that Coubertin was unwilling to acknowledge his antecedents, including both Zappas and Brookes,” Kitroeff said.