A Frenchman revived the Games
The ancient Olympic Games ended around the end of the fourth century AD. A French educator, Pierre de Coubertin, spent years campaigning to bring them back as an international festival of sport, and the first modern Games were held in Athens in 1896, with about 240 ATHLETE competitors, all men, from fourteen countries. Women first competed four years later, in Paris, and it was not until London in 2012 that every competing country sent at least one woman.
Coubertin also designed the five Olympic RINGS in 1913. He chose blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white background because at least one of those six colours appeared in the flag of every nation taking part at the time. Our ancient Greece page covers the original games at Olympia.
The torch relay is less ancient than it looks
The FLAME is lit at Olympia in Greece using sunlight focused by a curved mirror, then carried by relay to the host city. It feels like an ancient ritual, but the TORCH relay was first held in 1936, for the Berlin Games under the Nazi government, which used it as propaganda. The flame itself had first burned at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam. The relay has been kept at every Summer Games since.
Olympic GOLD medals are not solid gold. Since 1912 they have been made mostly of SILVER, with a coating of at least six grams of gold. The last solid-gold medals were awarded at the Stockholm Games that year. The winner stands on the top step of the PODIUM, with SILVER and BRONZE on either side.
Medals for poetry and painting
From 1912 to 1948 the Olympics awarded MEDAL prizes for art as well as sport: painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and music, all inspired by sport. Coubertin himself won a gold medal for literature in 1912 for a poem, entered under a false name. The art competitions were dropped partly because it was hard to show the artists were amateurs.
The DECATHLON — ten events over two days, including the HURDLES, the JAVELIN and the DISCUS — has long been used to crown the world's greatest all-round athlete. At the 1912 Games the King of Sweden is said to have told the winner, Jim Thorpe, that he was the greatest athlete in the world.
The Paralympics began in an English hospital
On the opening day of the 1948 London Olympics, the doctor Ludwig Guttmann held an archery contest for sixteen injured servicemen and women in wheelchairs at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. His Stoke Mandeville Games grew year by year and led to the first Paralympic Games, held in Rome in 1960. Today the Paralympics are one of the largest sporting events in the world.
The Winter Olympics began separately, in Chamonix in France in 1924. The Summer Games now include sports as varied as SWIMMING, DIVING, GYMNASTICS, ARCHERY, FENCING, ROWING, CYCLING and HOCKEY, as well as the SPRINT, the RELAY and the MARATHON. Our famous athletes page covers some of the Olympians who made history.