The present games of the olympics

Two years later, he got the approval he needed to found the International Olympic Committee IOC , which would become the governing body of the modern Olympic Games. The first modern Olympics were held in Athens, Greece, in In the opening ceremony, King Georgios I and a crowd of 60, spectators welcomed participants from 12 nations all male , who would compete in 43 events, including track and field, gymnastics, swimming, wrestling, cycling, tennis, weightlifting, shooting and fencing.

The official symbol of the modern Games is five interlocking colored rings, representing the continents of North and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. The Olympic flag, featuring this symbol on a white background, flew for the first time at the Antwerp Games in Some 3, athletes with more than women among them from 44 nations competed that year, and for the first time the Games featured a closing ceremony.

The Winter Olympics debuted that year, including such events as figure skating, ice hockey, bobsledding and the biathlon. Eighty years later, when the Summer Olympics returned to Athens for the first time in more than a century, nearly 11, athletes from a record countries competed. In a gesture that joined both ancient and modern Olympic traditions, the shotput competition that year was held at the site of the classical Games in Olympia. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Modern Olympic history is full of heart-thumping victories and painful defeats. From Athens to Rio, in the Since many national teams are financed by their governments, such a restructuring would require establishing a different manner of selecting athletes, a different structure to finance both the athletes' training and the competition.

Would there be team sports? There would certainly be a much smaller television audience, and therefore the supply of money would shrink significantly. No one wants that. Indeed, the Games would not be the same without a patina of nationalism. The national configuration of the Olympic stage has been particularly important for new and small states. Seeing their representatives in the parade of national athletes is a magic moment for fans around the world.

I once asked the president of Lithuania what he considered the significance of Lithuania's prominence as a world basketball power. Lithuania's population is roughly one percent of the population of the United States, a negligible percent of China's population.

He responded with the thought that a small country has very few opportunities to win positive attention on the world stage: basketball constitutes a powerful instrument for making the world aware of Lithuania's existence. In my opinion, the vast majority of National Olympic Committees NOCs around the world would oppose any move to change the present structure that is built on national teams.

So as long as the Olympics continue to be organized around national teams and nation states, political disputes involving those states will be part and parcel of the Games. Sport, Business, and Politics in a Media Age The IOC has traveled a long road to win this place at the center of world affairs, where news media breathlessly await the official judgment whether these particular Games were in fact the best of all time. In fact, in the s, the International Olympic Committee — the private, essentially self-chosen, international organization that owns the Games — was considering whether it could impose a tax on sporting events around the world in order to finance the staging of the quadrennial Games.

Now the IOC calculates its income in billions of dollars. The history of the relations between the Games and business is filled with very interesting events and developments. When Avery Brundage was president of the IOC , he objected to skiers displaying the makers' labels on their equipment in front of television cameras. In Nagano in members of the IOC proudly wore coats displaying the name of their maker. The Games have become a giant commercial playground.

The Games feature competition between businesses as well as athletes. In Munich in television networks battled for satellite time to show coverage of the hostage crisis to the American audience. In Nagano, CBS announcers wore jackets that featured a shoe company's logo, but because that company had not given money directly to the Games' treasury, those jackets could not show the Olympic rings.

A business may find it preferable, cheaper, to join the Games by sponsoring, say, a national ping pong team than by paying the IOC directly.

Money is the name of the game. The first explanation of today's riches and fame is obviously television money; the second is the money from corporate sponsors who want to exploit the Olympic symbols for their own businesses; and this year the third is of course the interest of the multinational concerns with business investments in China.

Ultimately the major factor that has intensified the visibility and thus the political potential of the Olympic Games has been television. Television did not invent the Games; despite their media sponsor, Ted Turner's Goodwill Games failed to offer serious competition. For many years, live media coverage was not a part of the Games at all; in the s IOC members were leery of radio broadcasts of the competition because that might reduce the income from tickets.

But after the IOC had successfully argued that it owned the Games, and that the Games did not constitute "news" that television had a right to observe free of cost, the two — the Games and TV — have grown in a symbiotic relationship. Roone Arledge built ABC's sports coverage — in my opinion using techniques gleaned from "The Triumph of the Will," Leni Riefenstahl's classic film of the Berlin Olympics — and today the Olympics are big time "show business," TV's most popular "reality show.

Television, in turn, offers opportunities for intruders to seize a moment on the world stage, whether the issue might be national oppression, aboriginal land rights, or self-publicity. Some of this is personal, as when people paint their faces for TV. Some of it is programmed: at American sporting events, like college football games, broadcasters have been known to bring signs for fans to wave for the camera.

Whatever the source, TV encourages certain forms of eccentric behavior on fans' part, but it disapproves of the "excessive" eccentric behavior. As far as TV executives are concerned, political or religious demonstrations tend to fall into the category of excess. Regardless, demonstrators seek out the TV cameras.

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The ancient Olympic Games grew and continued to be played every four years for nearly years. Approximately years later, a young Frenchmen named Pierre de Coubertin began their revival.

Coubertin was a French aristocrat born on January 1, He was only seven years old when France was overrun by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War of Some believe that Coubertin attributed the defeat of France not to its military skills but rather to the French soldiers' lack of vigor. Coubertin's attempt to get France interested in sports was not met with enthusiasm.

Still, Coubertin persisted. Two years later, Coubertin first pitched his idea to revive the Olympic Games. His speech did not inspire action. Though Coubertin was not the first to propose the revival of the Olympic Games, he was certainly the most well-connected and persistent of those to do so.

Two years later, Coubertin organized a meeting with 79 delegates who represented nine countries. He gathered these delegates in an auditorium that was decorated by neoclassical murals and similar additional points of ambiance. At this meeting, Coubertin eloquently spoke of the revival of the Olympic Games.