Someone, whether from your family or from your school, must have already mentioned something to you about the GamesOlympic, or the Olympics. You may have heard, for example, of current competitors, such as the American swimmer Michael Felps or the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, both multi-champions and Olympic record holders of the 21st century. Well, even if you don't know who these two athletes are, you've certainly watched an Olympic competition on television, like athletics, swimming, volleyball or fitness. But why are these competitions called “Olympics”? What is its origin? Anyway, what is the history of the Olympic Games?
→ Origin of the Olympic Games
Olympic games are very old competitions. go back to ancient greek civilization, especially to classic period of this civilization, in which city-states were at their peak as Athens, Sparta and Thebes. The games are named after the fact that, in Ancient Greece, they were held in a city-state called Olympia. The historical reasons for choosing Olympia as the venue for the games are not precisely known, but there are mythic-religious contours in this choice that must be taken into account.
Legend has it that the Greek hero Hercules (or heracles), son of god Zeus with a human, to celebrate the fulfillment of the first of her Twelve Jobs, opened a party in the city of Olympia in honor of his father. This party was characterized by sports game competitions, which took into account the performance of strength, speed, beauty of movements, etc.
In addition to this mythical narrative, there are other historical ones, but they are also shrouded in mysteries. It is the case of the Greek Korobean, that, it is counted, in the year of 776 a. C., would have won the first race of the Olympics, having run from the city of Elis to the stadium of Olympia. This would have been, in any case, the landmark of the origin of the Olympic sport known as athletics.
The fact is that, despite the lack of exact precision in defining the origin of the Olympic Games, citizens of Greek city-states, mainly from Athens and Sparta, actually made pilgrimages every four years to Olympia in order to devote themselves to the practice of the games. sports. This practice was in fact related to the cult of Zeus. So much so that, at the opening of the games, participants sacrificed animals in honor of Hercules' father. The competitions also had the function of celebrating the truce of the wars in which the Greek city-states were frequently involved.
With the end of the classical Greek civilization, sports games started to have a very particular configuration in each civilization after the Greeks, like the Romans, who enjoyed playing similar sports, but who had not established a direct association with the games of Olympia. The Olympic Games, as we know them today, only came into existence at the end of the 19th century through the work of a Swiss aristocrat named Pierre de Fredy, better known as Baron de Coubertin. Coubertin was one of the promoters of 1896 Summer Olympics, held in Athens, capital of Greece.
* Image credits: Shutterstock and Yazyllama
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
