I was challenged to write a listicle
Like any 130-year-old huge international event, the Olympic games have acquired some quirks over the decades. There are scandals that make the news – corruption, doping, politics, etc. – but there’s also plenty that’s just bizarre. Here are a few of the weird or obscure facts about the Olympics that I’ve come across:
1. Hercules was said to have organized the first ancient Olympics, where he won every event
This myth comes courtesy of Diodorus of Sicily.1 Diodorus, writing in Greek, would have called the hero “Herakles”, but since the games continued for several centuries after the Romans conquered Greece (probably until Theodosius I banned pagan festivals in 393 CE), the hero’s more famous Roman name “Hercules” is also appropriate.
Although Herakles was sometimes worshiped as a god himself, the ancient Olympics were dedicated to his father Zeus – with the Statue of Zeus at Olympia becoming one of the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”.
2. The 1904 Olympic marathon was a mess
Like the 1900 event in Paris, the 1904 Olympics were subsumed as part of the World’s Fair, also in St. Louis. Few people noticed the games. Had they noticed, maybe someone could have intervened.
The 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon was less a race and more of an experiment in torturing athletes with dehydration. (Seriously.) The race was run on dusty ground in the blazing afternoon Sun. There was only one official water station, halfway through the route, though one enterprising competitor managed to get a drink from a water tower about a quarter of the way through. Only 14 of the 32 athletes even finished the race. The US’s top two marathon runners both dropped out from dust and dehydration.
As Frederick Lorz was on the podium about to receive gold, spectators revealed that he’d actually dropped out, ridden in a car four and a half miles, then re-entered the race when his car broke down. Then the actual gold medalist, Thomas Hicks, arrived in critical medical condition. Not only was he dehydrated, Hicks’s trainer had given him rat poison as a performance enhancing drug. (As stupid as that was as a plan, it wasn’t technically against the rules at the time).
This is just the very beginning of the insane story of this marathon. If you want to learn more, I recommend Jon Bois’s video on the topic.
3. There was a bonus Olympics in 1906
The 1906 Olympics broke the four year cycle that started with the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896. Still, it may have saved the games. After the lackluster 1900 and 1904 events, and with the 1908 Rome games also to be held alongside a World’s Fair, the Greek “Committee of the Olympic Games” convinced the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to add an additional 1906 games in Athens, with the intention of alternating Olympics every 2 years between Greece and the rest of the world. It was the best organized games in a decade, featuring athletes from 20 nations,2 and may have saved the Olympics from a second extinction.
After the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius damaged Naples, the government of Italy diverted funds from their games to disaster relief. This meant the 1908 games had to be moved from Rome to London, but they were still successful. But the 1910 games never materialized, and the impact of the 1906 games has been forgotten over time. In 1949, the IOC’s first official historian Dr. Ferenc Mező asked the committee to classify the 1906 games as an official Olympics, but the IOC declined. They are now often called the “Intercalated Games”.
4. The Olympics used to give medals for art – but the art had to be about sports
From 1912 to 1948, the Olympics included artistic competitions – including architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.3 Even “town planning” was included from 1928, as a discipline within architecture. The requirement that the art had to be inspired by sports seems reasonable if your goal is to get artists to pay more attention to sports. In practice, though, it just meant that the world’s foremost artists decided they had better things to do than compete in the Olympics. Additionally, the IOC eventually decided that having professional artists compete violated the amateur spirit of the games, so the art competitions were replaced by non-competitive art exhibitions in the 1950’s.4
Some fun winners of art events: Jan Wils of the Netherlands won the Architecture gold medal at the 1928 Amsterdam games for designing the very stadium the games were being held in. Dr. Ferenc Mező from the previous fact won gold in literature for a history of the Olympic games. Julien Médécin of Monaco won Bronze for town planning in the Paris 1924 games, which remains Monaco’s only Olympic medal to this day.
5. The games have also had a lot of other weird sports
Breaking (aka breakdancing) got a lot of attention when it was included in the Paris 2024 summer Olympics, but it’s not the only unusual sport that’s earned athletes Olympic gold – even excluding the art. The London games of 1908 included “jeu de paume”, an older version of tennis, and “rackets”, an older version of squash (in which only British athletes actually chose to compete). The 1920’s and 1930’s saw medals for feats of aeronautics and alpinism from the prior 4 years.
If you include demonstration sports and sports the IOC considers unofficial, there’s firefighting, ballooning, and pigeon racing from 1900, “Gotland Sports” (such as log tossing) in 1912, Korfball (similar to basketball) in 1928, Pesäpallo (a Finnish variant of baseball) in 1952, and roller hockey (hockey on roller skates) in 1992.
6. The Olympics gives diplomas to the top 8 athletes in each event
This has been a tradition since the very first modern Olympics in 1896.5 Originally, only the winner got a diploma, but the number has increased over the years, and now the top 8 all get diplomas. The weird part about this is that most people don’t know about Olympic diplomas (including some of the athletes that got them),6 but they still get made and mailed out as a matter of tradition.
7. The Olympics only allowed professional athletes in 1988
The original founder of the Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, envisioned a competition full of gentlemen athletes who competed for the love of the sport. As the games evolved, that ethos proved controversial, with many of the world’s top athletes being excluded because they were paid for playing sports – on national or local teams, or even as trainers. It didn’t help that Eastern Bloc countries like the USSR would have “full time amateurs” that were given everything they needed to train but weren’t technically paid money.
In 1988, the IOC finally changed the rules so individual sports could allow professionals to compete in the games.7 The fabled 1992 US Basketball “Dream Team” would take full advantage of this decision at the next summer games.
8. The International Olympic Committee does more than just the Olympics
The Youth Olympic Games are also organized by the IOC,8 as was the 2023 “Olympics Esports Series” in Singapore.9 Additionally, smaller associations of countries’ National Olympic Committees host the Asian Games, Pan American Games, Pacific Games, African Games, and European Games, all of which are officially recognized by the IOC and allowed to use the Olympic Rings.10
The Paralympics are organized by a separate group, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). The IPC and IOC formally agreed in 2001 to always host their games in the same city, though the practice started informally in 1988.
Coming soon: Review: The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel by Maciej Cegłowski
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