- 13 hours ago
Professor of Sport Studies Amy Bass joins WIRED to answers the internet's burning questions about the history of the Olympics. When were the first olympics contested? How do the olympic games of Ancient Greece compare to the modern incarnation? Who is the biggest underdog to ever take home an olympic gold medal? What is the oldest unbroken Olympic record? What's a sport that could one day become an Olympic event? Have the Olympics ever been canceled? Answers to these questions and many more await on Olympic History Support.
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00:00I'm Amy Bass, professor of sports studies. I'm here today to answer your questions from the
00:04internet. This is Olympic History Support.
00:12Buckshot0331 wants to know, is the Olympics today the same Olympics that the ancient Greeks did?
00:18Absolutely not. The antiquity games basically focused on things like running and wrestling,
00:24some boxing, some jumping, where we have so many events in the modern games, over 200 countries.
00:31We have women competing, almost 11,000 athletes. And I think most importantly in the modern games,
00:37the athletes wear clothes. Alfbridge43 asks, what were the original ancient Greek Olympic sports?
00:44And the answer to that is simple. It was running. It was a sprint, one race to honor Zeus,
00:49games over. TW Chanda asks, was Cool Runnings a true story? So Cool Runnings, of course,
00:55is the film made about the Jamaican bobsled team. And there is a Jamaican bobsled team.
01:01They're actually pretty good now. And I think that the Jamaican bobsled team sort of has that
01:05cultural hold on everybody because it is a classic fish out of water story. There's no snow in Jamaica.
01:11There's no bobsled runs in Jamaica, but they do have a running culture. And so that idea of fast
01:16runners pushing a bobsled became that kind of a dream. And thus, we have Cool Runnings.
01:20JazzlakeGarage2799 wants to know, who's the biggest underdog to win a gold medal?
01:25That, I think almost everyone will agree, took place in Salt Lake City in 2002,
01:30when Australian short track speed skater Stephen Bradbury won gold. He was so far behind the leaders,
01:36which was tons of Korean skaters, American Apollo Anton Ono, who was the headline of the Salt Lake
01:42Games. They had a massive pileup, which happens a lot in short track. It's basically roller derby
01:46on ice. Bradbury was so far behind the leaders that he was able to avoid and step over the carnage
01:53in front of him to skate across the finish line first. Everybody else had to crawl.
01:57Ralph Jenkins2021 wants to know, what Olympic sport is the hardest?
02:00I think there's two ways to look at it. There's the skill set sports, and then there's just the,
02:04this is a really hard sport sports. So decathlon, heptathlon, modern pentathlon,
02:09sports where you need to know how to do more than one thing and do it really,
02:14really well are very difficult sports. And sometimes it doesn't have to be a whole bunch
02:19of things. I think biathlon, a winter Olympic sport that combines Nordic skiing and shooting
02:24is a terribly difficult sport. You can't dope for it because anything that you do to make yourself a
02:29faster skier is going to hurt you as a shooter. You are racing, racing, racing, and then you have
02:33to lie down on your stomach and hit a target. It's very, very difficult. But I think then you can flip to
02:38the other side and say, just what is a grueling sport? And I think most people would agree that
02:42it's water polo. You can't touch the sides. You can't touch the bottom. You are treading water.
02:47You are creating power to score goals with a ball. You are knocking each other's teeth out. It is just
02:52an absolutely brutal sport. Hey, a Quora user asks, when were the first Olympic games? So that question
02:59begs for two answers. The very first Olympic games were 776 BC in Olympia, Greece. There was one event,
03:06a sprint race. It honors Zeus. The Olympics we know. 1896, Athens launched the modern Olympic games
03:13with about 14 countries competing in a handful of sports. A Reddit user asks, what was the biggest
03:19mistake made in Olympic history? For mistakes that the Olympics have made, I think 2000 Sydney
03:24gymnastics setting the vault at the wrong height is sort of sticks out above a lot of other errors
03:30that have taken place. The fact that the vault was actually set at the wrong height and it wasn't
03:35until people were crashing out on it. It's just one of the biggest mistakes in Olympic history.
03:39But then we can look at mistakes that athletes made. I think that Lindsay Jacobellis,
03:42snowboarder, is probably going to win, unfortunately, that race. In Torino, she was ahead by a lot in
03:50snowboard cross and sort of to celebrate before the finish line, threw a method grab, a little bit of
03:56flare and crashed and everybody passed her and she lost the medal.
04:00CelticNorseMan2 asks, what do the rings in the Olympic flag mean? So the five rings in the Olympic
04:07flag represent the five continents of the globe and those colors, five colors of the rings on a white
04:13background, include a color from every flag in the world. Cody Taplin asks, how TF is breakdancing in the
04:21Olympics? Breakdancing came and went with the Paris Olympics in 2024. Australia's ray gun making headlines
04:28for a less than gold medal performance. And that's part of what the IOC, the International Olympic
04:34Committee, does every once in a while to try to attract a younger audience. But it has worked in
04:39the past. If you look at sort of the ex-gamesification of the winter games with things like snowcross and
04:45halfpipe, we have seen a rise in those kinds of sort of younger skewed sport. It was to try to,
04:51you know, create the success of the urban vibe that skateboarding brought with its launch in Tokyo,
04:55but I don't think it was terribly successful. Zizbird asks, who is the Winter Olympics GOAT?
05:02There's two ways to look at that. You could do total accumulated medals, Marit Björgen, Norwegian
05:07cross-country skier, 15 total medals, most decorated in a single Olympic Games, 1980 Lake Placid,
05:13Eric Hyden for speed skating. Or you can look at what's still to come. We have GOATS in our midst right
05:18now. Michaela Schifrin as a slalom skier, the winningest World Cup skier in history. We have Chloe Kim
05:24looking to just continue to be unbeatable. Snowboard halfpipe. So keep your eyes peeled.
05:29There's GOATS coming.
05:30Shadus X wants to know, what prompted the restart of the Olympics in the late 1800s?
05:36So the launch of the Olympics in 1896 was the brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin. And he
05:43was a sport enthusiast who wanted to bring together the children of the world, understanding that sport
05:47was a unifying agent, physical fitness was important, and thus he wanted to relaunch it
05:53as a global event.
05:54Mr. K. Wisconsin asks, whoever developed the modern pentathlon was definitely high when
05:59they did so. Not so much a question, more of a statement, but a pretty accurate one.
06:03Modern pentathlon was the brainchild also again of the modern Olympic founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin,
06:08and he wanted to bring together a range of skills that personified what he thought a modern soldier
06:13needed to be able to do. It's varied over its history. Fencing, equestrian, running, shooting,
06:19swimming. Sometimes it takes place over three days. Sometimes it takes place in one day.
06:23Sometimes they have time limits of two hours. And one of the keys to being successful at
06:27modern pentathlon, you have to be really good at all of those different things.
06:31Brisbane 2032 asks, when did the Olympics first award gold, silver, and bronze medals? And that's
06:37a great question because it did not happen at the first modern iteration of the games. It
06:41was 1904 in St. Louis where gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded. The ancient Greeks
06:47did not do medals. They did reeds.
06:49Spinnable Sports wants to know, what was the most memorable moment in Olympic history?
06:54Wow. This is a hard one because it depends on what you prioritize.
06:58Recently, Simone Biles in Paris throwing a Yurchenko double pike on the vault. First woman
07:03to ever land that in Olympic games, something they couldn't even score. It was so difficult.
07:07Looking at Jesse Owens' four Olympic golds in Berlin in 1936, you know, so-called Hitler's
07:13games, having a black American pull that feet off. But even with those two amazing things,
07:18I think most people would say 1980, miracle on ice, Lake Placid, U.S. hockey team defeating
07:24the Soviets in the semifinal, and then going on to win gold against Finland.
07:28Lazy Condition Zero brings an excellent question. Who are some Olympic athletes who dominated their
07:34sport to the same or greater degree as Simone Biles dominates gymnastics, and Michael Phelps
07:38in his prime dominated his swimming events? One of the things about who dominates a sport and has
07:43the most medals in the Olympics is that some sports, like gymnastics and swimming, have a lot of events
07:49that one athlete competes in, so they accumulate a lot of medals. But I like to look at an athlete like
07:55Al Order, who won the discus in four consecutive Olympic games, gold medal, over the course of 16
08:01years. So that's complete dominance, but he only gets one medal per games, unlike Michael Phelps,
08:06who always brings home a haul of medals. For winter games, I would look at Norway's Marit Björgen,
08:1115 medals in cross-country skiing, eight of which are gold, the most successful winter Olympian.
08:16But then you want to look at a single game's dominant sport, and for that I would go to Eric Heiden,
08:211980, Lake Placid, five gold medals in speed skating, he sweeps the sport.
08:26Christopher McCraw wants to know, what are the biggest scandals in Olympic history? And Christopher,
08:30there is no simple answer to that question. We have political scandal, we have doping scandals,
08:35we have bribery scandals. We could look at Salt Lake City's bid, which was full of corruption and
08:39sort of changed the makeup of the IOC. We can look at doping scandals like individual athletes,
08:44American cyclist Lance Armstrong, track star from the 2000 Games, Marion Jones, which sort of ripped the
08:51lid off of the entire Balco drug scandal. You can look at the Russian doping scandal, which was
08:55systemic, institutional, so the entirety of the Russian delegation has been banned from Olympic
09:01competition, not just because of the doping they were doing, but because of the covering up that
09:06they were doing. And then you have, you know, smaller things per sport. Again, in Sydney in 2000,
09:11the vault was set at the wrong height, which meant a lot of people crashed and burned before someone
09:15figured out that the vault was set at the wrong height. Big Red Bear 2 asks,
09:20what restrictions were there on visitors to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin hosted by Hitler?
09:25There were black and Jewish athletes from the U.S. and other countries. So Berlin in 36 is called by
09:31historians a facade of hospitality. The athletes who were competing, Jesse Owens being of course the
09:37standout athlete, they were almost propaganda tools. See, we're welcoming everybody. Look,
09:42there's a black man on the field. They were not as hospitable to the visitors that were being
09:47welcomed into Berlin. So a lot of folks experienced discrimination and hostility upon setting foot
09:54as an Olympic spectator in Berlin. We have a Quora user asking, what is the oldest unbroken Olympic
10:00record as of today? And that one was set in 1968. Mexico City, American long jumper Bob Beeman is the
10:07first human to break 29 feet. Mike Powell did break that record for a world record in 1991, but no one has
10:14ever jumped further at an Olympic Games. It is good to put a little tiny asterisk next to that because the
10:20Mexico City Olympic Games took place at altitude and that literally enabled people to fly.
10:25Major Spiritual 1963 asks, what was the greatest opening and closing ceremony in Summer Winter Olympics?
10:31I think Summer Olympics almost always have the edge on this. Winter Olympic opening and closing often
10:36take place outside in winter, which limits a lot of what they can do, which isn't to say we haven't
10:41seen some spectacular. The opening ceremony in Vancouver, for example, was absolutely a beautiful
10:46tribute to Canadian heritage. I think in terms of spectacle, however, Beijing 2008 is going to win
10:53just for the absolutely unprecedented synchronicity that we saw. The tales that came out afterwards,
11:00you know, performers under the stage for umpteen hours wearing diapers to keep them there. So once
11:05we learned how they did it, I think it became a little bit less glitz and glam. But when Beijing 2008
11:11happened, it absolutely blew every other opening ceremony off the water. I would also say that we have
11:17poignant moments in opening and closing ceremonies, really beautiful moments. And for that, I'm going to go to
11:22Atlanta, 1996, where we see Muhammad Ali take the torch from swimming legend Janet Evans, and Muhammad
11:29Ali lights the cauldron and stands before the world with the Olympic flame over his head. There was not
11:34a dry eye in the house. Eka004 asks, what's an unlikely sport that could now have a shot at being an
11:41Olympic event? Olympic events come and go. They can depend on the host country and the culture of that
11:47country. We see flash in the pan sports like breakdancing in Paris. We see new sports emerge,
11:51flag football in 2028, Los Angeles. That's not an accident. The NFL is very excited about the growth
11:58of flag football in the United States, particularly on the girls' side. And then you have new sports
12:02like Milan Cortina. We're going to see ski mountaineering, where we're going to be watching
12:06people running up a mountain with their skis and then skiing down it. So never say never,
12:12pretty much for any sport. KangarooKey2017 asks, what age were you when you realized that curling
12:18is the best sport in the world? I've always known that. We identify with curling because it looks
12:24like something we can all do. Those athletes look like us, which isn't to take anything away from
12:28their skill and athleticism. You have to remember that everything a curler is doing, they're doing on
12:33ice and they're not falling down and they're getting a relatively small object into a relatively
12:38small space over a relatively large expanse of ice. MCQ101 wants to know, when were women first
12:45allowed to compete in the Olympics? Women launched their careers as Olympians in 1900 at the second
12:51Olympics. There were five sports, the usual suspects for what's okay for a woman to do,
12:56things like tennis. We didn't see distant sports for women in the Olympics until much later. Actually,
13:02distant sports were banned for women starting in 1960 after a completely fabricated story about
13:07women passing out during the 800 meters ripped headlines. And we're not going to see an Olympic
13:12marathon for women until LA 84. Women are now dominating a lot for the US team, but it has been a
13:18journey. Biz Bastard wants to know, why is Fosbury flop the most efficient way to do high jump? Well,
13:22when Dick Fosbury launched that flop very successfully, everyone thought it was kind of
13:28nuts, but really it's a simple physics equation where Dick Fosbury was raising the center of his
13:34body and lowering the rest of it to create the arch over the bar. Before Dick Fosbury, high jumpers
13:40looked face forward at the jump. Fosbury turns the vertical into a horizontal and that was a more
13:46efficient and better way to jump. AdditionalSky7436 asks,
13:50What historic Olympic team was the best basketball team? So I think the obvious answer here for almost
13:56everybody is the 1992 so-called dream team, the USA basketball team that was just stacked with NBA
14:03professionals. But I'm going to counter that a little bit. Take a look at the women's side from Atlanta
14:08to Paris. They're undefeated gold medals across 10 games. That is a dynasty that should not be questioned
14:15in basketball. Ace of Hearts 2022 asks, How in the world could the Munich Olympics keep going on while a
14:21massacre was taking place? So this question refers to the hostage situation with the Israeli team by the
14:27Black September movement in 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games. There was a pause in competition, but IOC
14:34President Avery Brundage, a businessman from Chicago with, I would say, interesting political views,
14:40issued his famous statement of the games must go on, and thus the games did.
14:46Vera Enjoyer asks, The USA is one of the most prolific nations in the Olympics. What factors have led to
14:52this dominance? Well, the United States benefits from a lot of different weather systems and terrains,
14:57so that makes different kinds of sports part of the menu in the United States. It is a sports-crazed
15:02country with a lot of well-endowed professional leagues. And we also have this thing called the NCAA,
15:07so intercollegiate sport in the United States, which brings a lot of athletes from around the
15:12world to play competitively, is a massive training ground for future Olympians. James Giles asks,
15:19I wonder how much Olympians of today would beat the ancient Greek Olympians by? They'd beat them by a lot.
15:24Nutrition, training, focus, actual dedicated athlete as a career, there's no match. Ellen De Silva wants to
15:32know, Serious question. Okay, thank you. Does the Olympic torch go through every country,
15:36or just the country of the Olympics? How does it travel over oceans? So the Olympic torch used to
15:41try to go to as many countries as possible. And very recently, the International Olympic Committee,
15:46the IOC, changed that because the torch relay route, which used to be a space where people came
15:52out and cheered and the torch ran by and you took a selfie and that was you with the torch,
15:56became a site for protests. So they'd now try to limit the torch relay route between Greece and the
16:02host country. FL Web Pro asks, did China clear chronic smog for the 2008 Olympics using cloud
16:08seeding to produce heavy rain? There was blue sky in 2008 for the Beijing Olympics, and it was
16:13primarily because they shut down their industrial manufacturing segment. So there were no factories
16:21actually in operation leading up to those games and during those games, and that gave Beijing blue skies.
16:27A Reddit user wants to know, has someone ever died due to an accident while doing a sporting event?
16:32And the answer to that, sadly, is yes. Most recently in 2010, in Vancouver, on a practice run on the
16:39luge track, a Georgian luger crashed and unfortunately lost his life. A Reddit user wants to know, who would
16:46you crown as the greatest track and field athlete of all time? This is another really tough one. You have
16:52folks like Allison Felix, who have just accumulated a pile of medals. You have someone like Wymia
16:58Tyus, who in 64 and 68 defended a sprinting title, the first person to ever do that. You have people
17:04who do 100 and 200 doubles, 200 and 400 doubles. Al Order wins discus again four times in a row. So
17:11over the course of 16 years, Al Order wins gold in discus. Usain Bolt setting records that were just
17:18untouchable for so long. Track and field is such an enormous sport. It depends what event you want to
17:23look at and what you consider to be the merit for the greatest. T. Alkazin wants to know, how are we
17:28still breaking world records in Olympic sports? In some events, all top three broke the world record.
17:34I think athletes got better at doping or they're making racing distances shorter. Well, let's hope
17:38neither of those things are true. We look at sport now as a science. The technology of sport, from nutrition
17:45to training practices, to equipment, mean that records will continue to be broken. The idea
17:51that figure skaters, for example, are throwing quadruple jumps was absolutely unimaginable not
17:57that long ago. Nahim says, reading up on the Black Power salute in 1968, how did I not know about this
18:02before? 1968 Olympic Black Power protest. Sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos, American medalists,
18:09gold and bronze. Record-breaking. Tommy Smith was the first human to run a 200 meters
18:15in a sub-20 race. And they took their moment in the spotlight to make a stance connected to the
18:21civil rights movement. And you should know it because it should be taught and it should be
18:24talked about. There's a lot of myths about what happened to Tommy and John post-Olympics. They did
18:28lose their Olympic credentials and they had to go home. They did keep their medals, but there were
18:32terrible consequences that they faced, backlash that they faced, people who really felt that they
18:36had ruined sport. Guy Fawkes News asks, does hosting the Olympics actually pay off? The short answer is no.
18:44It is wildly expensive and economically draining to host an Olympic Games, particularly recently
18:51where security alone is something that can just bloat the budget beyond anything that a
18:56city can handle. It was designed to build facilities, create infrastructure. And if we look back
19:02historically, that is true. So for example, in 1968, Mexico City, telecom improvements had to be made
19:09to that region in order for the Olympics to be hosted there. It was the first time that an American
19:13network, for example, had hosted a wide broadcast. ABC Sports did 44 hours of coverage of Mexico City,
19:19and that's our first really large-scale broadcast of a Games. That said, today the cost is draining.
19:25So if we look at our next Olympics, Cortina Milan, you see the Italians trying to reuse as much as
19:31possible from when Cortina hosted the Olympics in 1956. So today it's much more about sustainability
19:37and reusing facilities rather than build, build, build. Crafty Mare wants to know,
19:42was there cheating in ancient sports competitions? Of course, there's always been cheating. We've never
19:46not cheated at stuff as humans. We had sabotage in the ancient games. There was bribery in the ancient
19:52games. Probably tripping. I don't know. I'm speculating. But yes, the Greeks absolutely cheated
19:57in the ancient games. Storm and Pumpkin asks, watching the Olympics, what countries have rivalries?
20:03All I know is USA rivals. And that's okay because the USA has a lot of them. USA, Australia swimming,
20:09USA, Canada. Hockey is certainly, women and men, one of the biggest. There's a lot of rivalries in
20:14baseball, China, Japan, and Cuba. Absolutely. And then we sort of have the historic rivalries where
20:19if you follow the political lines of the world at any given moment, the entirety of the Cold War,
20:25so the Soviet Union in the United States, Eastern Europe and the United States, but you also see
20:30things like Japan and Korea, where North Korea fits in into the Olympic world is constantly creating
20:38sort of us and them binaries. Jamaica versus everybody in terms of track and field. You just
20:43got to look for them. Classic Poodle asks, have Olympics ever been canceled before? Didn't the U.S.
20:49skip them one year? Yes. World War I and World War II meant that Olympic games were canceled too for
20:55World War II. Then we actually have a postponement. If we think not that long ago, Tokyo 2020 became
21:00Tokyo 2021, even though we still called it Tokyo 2020, because no one wanted to change the merch.
21:07And there is one games that the United States boycotted, 1980 Moscow, the ultimate Cold War move.
21:13Flash forward four years to Los Angeles, Eastern Europe returned to the favor by boycotting on their
21:18part. Board Bouncer wants to know, did Russia cheat at the Olympics? The most simple answer to that is yes.
21:23Russia was banned from the Olympics by WADA, the world doping agency, because of systemic
21:29institutionalized doping and an enormous cover-up scheme so that that doping was not detected.
21:37Russian athletes can still compete in the Olympics, but they have to compete as neutrals.
21:42That ban was then extended after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia's fate as an Olympic entity
21:49remains kind of blurry. Keyopinion1700 wants to know, many people say most Olympians are doping,
21:55but how do they pass the tests then? The whole system of doping is that your testing protocol needs
22:01to be one step ahead of the doping protocol, and quite often that is not the case. So the pattern of
22:08doping, when athletes do and don't engage, how they may or may not avoid out-of-competition testing,
22:15in terms of what Russia did, they created an entire system of neutralizing the tests,
22:20switching them out that was undetectable until there was a whistleblower. So basically,
22:25avoiding doping tests needs to be one step ahead of actual doping, and that's how you get away with
22:31it. A Quora user asks,
22:33can an Olympic athlete refuse a medal? Technically, no. You're not supposed to,
22:38because it's considered by the IOC to be an insult against the games. And some athletes have been
22:43banned or censured for behaving inappropriately with a medal, throwing down a medal. But really,
22:48the most significant moment in which athletes refused a medal is 1972. The U.S. men's basketball
22:54team refused to accept the silver medal. And this is one of the most controversial moments in Olympic
22:59history. It was the Soviet Union versus the United States. America invented basketball. This was never
23:06supposed to be something that they could lose. During that basketball game, the refs kept adding three
23:11seconds back onto the clock until the Soviets won. The United States refused to accept the silver,
23:16and those medals remain in a vault in Switzerland. A Reddit user wants to know,
23:21what happened to the full-body suits in the Olympics? So I'm assuming that this question is
23:26asking about swimmers and the so-called Speedo sharkskin suit. And that was an incredible technology
23:31that took away drag, which is the swimmer's body going through the water, and added buoyancy.
23:37And after pretty much every record was broken by anyone wearing one, FINA, which is the
23:42international federation that supervises swimming and regulates swimming, said no more. And they
23:47were banned. A Quarry user asks, how were the Olympics experienced before the invention of
23:52television? We almost can't think about watching the Olympics without thinking about the Olympic
23:58broadcast. There's more Olympic broadcast hours in a day than there are hours in a day. But we really
24:03didn't see those full-scale broadcasts until the late 50s and 1960s. Cortina, the Winter Games in 1956,
24:10was the actual first broadcast of a Games. There were 15-minute snippets from Tokyo in 64. But 1968,
24:18ABC Sports really creates the blueprint for a massive platform of Olympic programming. And it was still
24:24only 44 hours. But then 44 hours was a massive undertaking by a network. Before that, it was old-fashioned
24:31newspaper, radio, and the radio broadcasts were exciting and people huddled around the radio just
24:37as they did for any other sports broadcast. Or you could hop on a plane or a boat and actually go and
24:42be a spectator. All right, that's all of the questions for today. Thanks for watching, and I hope you learned
24:47something.
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