Blaine Newnham / Times associate editor
Olympic games bringing it all back home

THANASSIS STAVRAKIS / AP Tourists take photographs at the entrance of the ancient stadium of Olympia, which will host the shot put competition at this year's Summer Olympics.

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Other links The Olympic Games through antiquity

OLYMPIA, Greece — Just to walk down the straightaway where they ran, to see not only the stones marking the finish of the race, but the toeholds carved in those marking the start of the race.

To imagine them nude and noble, history's first athletes in history's first stadium.

I couldn't believe I was really here, in late March, among the olive groves, awaiting the appearance of the Olympic torch, ignited nearby in the Temple of Hera, soon to cover the globe and return Friday for the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics.

The birthplace of the Olympic Games, in the pine-surrounded fields of the Peloponnese, is an archaeological shrine.

On Aug. 18 it will become a stadium again, connecting the past with the present, celebrating Greece as not only the birthplace of the ancient Olympics, but the modern ones as well.

This is the reason the world has put up with the construction delays in Athens, the bickering of politicians, the heightened possibility of terrorism and the reality of a hot, polluted Greek summer for the upcoming Games.

It's all about the past, about a marathon race actually beginning in Marathon and faithfully tracing the run of the ancient warrior Philippides, who apparently gasped "Nike" — the word telling of victory by the Athenians over the Persians — before dropping dead.

In terms of results, he gave the news of the day while establishing a route for the ages.

The 2004 Games are about a cycling race rolling by the ancient Acropolis. About the marathon ending in the breathtakingly beautiful marble stadium that was used for the first modern games in Athens in 1896.

Although it is only for the men's and women's shot put, for the first time in 1,600 years an Olympic event will be held in the original Olympic stadium, in Olympia about 200 miles west of Athens.
 
"I will truly be honored to compete there," said American shot-putter Adam Nelson, the silver medalist at the Sydney Olympics.

Spectators will sit on grassy hillsides. There will be no bleachers, no electronic scoreboards, no advertising, no charge for tickets. There will be clothes and women competitors, however, unlike ancient times.

"Our event is a simple one, a classical one," Nelson said. "All we need is a ball and a circle."

The shot put will be held two days before track and field begins in the main Olympic Stadium in Athens, simple and sanguine, a brilliant attempt to bridge the old with the new. It will be a time to remember that a truce from war prevailed during the ancient games, and hope that it will as well during these Olympics.

Despite the logistical problems involved with holding one event 200 miles from the other, the shot put will receive more attention than ever before.

As the mythology goes, the Greek gods started their competitions near Mount Olympus, with Apollo defeating Ares at boxing and Zeus the winner over Cronos in wrestling.

The first recorded Olympic champion among mortal men was Koroibos, who was first to the finish line in the Olympia stadium in 776 B.C. He covered a distance known as the stadion, about 200 yards, or one length of the ancient stadium.

The old stadium is twice as long as a football field, and half as wide. It has no bleachers, but its amphitheater-like surroundings can hold up to 40,000 spectators.

While they will have to undergo security screening, they won't be segregated by sex. In the old days, the undesirables were weeded out and prohibited from spectating. They consisted of slaves, convicts and women.

As the story goes, one woman, Kallipateira, dared watch the competitions in disguise to see her son, Peisirodos, a boxer. So excited at his victory, she leaped over a barricade, only to expose herself.

Women before her had been pushed off a cliff for such insubordination, but Kallipateira, because her husband and brother were also Olympic champions, was spared.

There were chariot races, horse races, wrestling, boxing, and track and field. According to historians, the long jump mark of Chionis, who won the event in 656 B.C., is still recognizable. The distance? More than 23 feet.

Like now, the ancient games were every four years but never lasted more than a week. There were also the Pythian Games, as well as the Isthmian Games, so the Greeks didn't have to wait for four years to compete.

The original Olympics were canceled after 10 centuries by the Roman emperor Theodosius I in 393 A.D. A Christian, Theodosius deemed the Olympics as pagan.

It would take more than 10 centuries for them to reappear. In the meantime, earthquakes and floods covered the ancient stadium and neighboring temples — including the Palestra indoor arena — under 10 feet of mud and dirt.

Excavations of the sacred sites in the 1800s helped inspire a Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, to revive the Games, choosing Athens as the first host city of the modern era.

The old stadium in Athens — built in 330 B.C. — was restored for the first modern games, and sits there gleaming today in the middle of downtown Athens, a simple, pure marble structure with a track shaped like a paper clip, six lanes and 200-yard straightaways.

There are marble statues and a monument that records the sites of all the modern Olympics, but there are no skyboxes or scoreboards. The Panhellenic Stadium, as it is called, will also host the 2004 archery competition.

The Greeks, flowering under history's first democracy, had free time for sport. It wasn't until the late 1800s — more than 2,000 years later — that the world enjoyed a similar freedom, where people had the time and opportunity to nourish their bodies as well as their brains and souls.

The Olympic ideal, lost in the economics needed to pay for an event that draws more than 200 countries and 10,000 athletes, needs to get in touch with its roots.

For all the problems Greece had had attempting to stage these Games, they might best be remembered for simply coming home to where they belong.

Blaine Newnham: 206-464-2364 or bnewnham@seattletimes.com.