Olympics
The long history
Intro
The Original Olympics
This paragraph will be all about what the Olympics are and what it was meant for and when it took place. The original Olympic Games were held in ancient Greece in the city of Olympia around 776 BC till 393 AD until stopping for 1503 years until coming back in 1896. The original Olympics were held 2,700 years ago and the games were held every 4 years just like today but the amount of time it took to finish was 5 days.
Festival
The Olympics wasn’t actually a sports event like today, it was actually a festival for the King of the Gods Zeus and the main event was actually where they sacrificed 300 oxen to him on the third day of the event. This was a huge event in Greece, it was so important that before the games started messengers were sent out to postpone wars so athletes could make it safely to the event. Around 50,000 people also came to the event to cheer or watch the games. Now that we’ve talked about what the original Olympics were and what it was for let’s talk about the events that took place in the games.
A walkway to the stadium
What it might have looked like back then
Another walkway
The Events
The Games
One of the more popular event then was running. Running was exactly what it, athletes would run long distances and whoever ran it the fastest wins. Next is Javelin which is when athletes would throw a sharpened wooden stick as far as they could, most of them would wound a strip of cloth near the edge and when they throw it would unravel causing it to spin gaining more speed which means farther distance. My favorite sports event then was Discus which is when athletes would through either a flat rock or bronze disc as far as they could. The cool thing is today we use discs 2 times lighter than they did which means they could be throwing something like 6,6 kg a couple of feet from them.
The Honors
There were no podiums or medals back then like today. Instead they were given a wreath or leaves and a hero’s welcome back home, people back than saw winners as being touched by the gods of Olympus. So now that we’ve seen back into the past at what the Olympics were back than now let’s go to more modern times to when the Olympics came back.
The Comeback
The Athens games
280 participants from 13 nations including Belgium, England, France, Greece, Italy, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United States and a couple others competed in the first modern Olympics in Athens.
Some of the more modern racing events
The 1896 Olympics
Some American fans
Today
Today there are 206 countries competing in the Olympics from every continent in the world except Antarctica. But that’s a huge leap from the Athens games and it shows that the Olympics have now become one of the most popular events in the world. So this was a lot about the modern Olympics and what the Olympics are right now but now we must finish this article off.
Conclusion
The Olympics was an amazing historical event in history and an awesome one at that. But it shows how far it’s come in popularity and participants throughout the history of the world and it all started in the Greek city of Olympia. I wrote this article because I’ve been kind of interested in the Olympics since 2nd grade when they showed us this video about the Olympics and from then on it was always an interesting topic to me and I can’t wait for the 2016 Olympics to start. So I feel I wrote about this topic because it’s really an important historical event and it was interesting to me so I hope I got you more background of the this worldwide event and how it came to be.