Olympic Cavalcade

THE ANCIENT OLYMPIC GAMES amateurism. Sport was still recreational and training merely traditional. Sp·ort then existed for the benefit of the participants, not for the spectators and the Press. It was an age of organized competition, gymnastic education, but no systematic training. It was the Age which produced the Greek athletic ideal. This reached its highest expression in the sculpture of the fifth · century. That the gymnasium was already established as an integral part of educa– tion has been mentioned. The development of athletic beauty among the Greeks, who were already, literally, a nation of athletes, may be traced to the growth of city life, the increasing importance of the gymnasium and the organized education of the Epheboi. The gymnasium, moreover, to which not only athletes in training, but also sculptors and poets, resorted daily, supplies the above link between Greek athletics and art. The anatomists, too, derived great benefit from the gymnasium, since the Greeks held the view that not to be seen naked was the mark of a . barbarian. But the very popularity of athletics in Greece was to produce the disaster of professionalism which is the end of all true sport. The rot may be traced back to the-votive offerings and the hymns of praise of even the sixth century, which placed the Olympic Victor on a pedestal denied to other men, and to the triumphs, equal to those of a conquering general returning from a campaign, which were offered to the Olympic Victor upon his return to his native city. Then, as now, the excessive rewarding of athletic prowess did not escape criticism. Xenophanes was among the first of the critics and Euripides emphasized it when he said: "Of all the countless eyils throughout Hellas none is worse than the race of athletes. • • . In youth they strut about in splendour, the idols ofthe city, but when bitter old age comes upon them they are cast aside like worn-out cloaks." When cash enters into sport, corruption is bound to follow, and later, and within a century, the whole atmosphere of athletics was altered, but the old Greek athletic ideal was maintained through many Olympiads. . Then, as now, sports involving persona] bodily contact became brutal– ized. The professional wrestlers and boxers overshadowed the amateur, and huge purses, win or lose, were competed for. And so we arrive at the brutal spectacle of the Roman Circus. Chariot races, boxing and wrestling were still contested, but, to take but one example, the soft thongs which protected the haflds of the Greek boxers were replaced by the murderous caestus of the Roman.' · The history of organized athletics in, Greece covers some twelve hundred years. The Olympic Register was instituted and came into use as the recognized method of reckoning dates in 776 B.c. and terminated B