That small correction is a good way into the whole story. The Olympics are full of noble ideals, and almost every one of them comes with an asterisk.
The ancient Games: real, but not quite as advertised
The traditional start date is 776 BC, when a man named Coroebus of Elis is recorded as winning the stadion, a sprint of roughly 192 metres at Olympia, in a festival honouring Zeus. The date comes from ancient lists that can't be checked, and archaeology suggests major games at Olympia began somewhat later, around 700 BC. For over a thousand years the festival was held every four years. The last recorded Games are usually dated to around 393 AD under the Christian emperor Theodosius I, though archaeological evidence suggests some games were held after that.
Two asterisks. First, the athletes were men, mostly competing naked, and women were largely shut out; ancient sources disagree about whether married women could even watch. Second, the first woman recorded as an Olympic champion, the Spartan princess Kyniska, won the four-horse chariot race in 396 and 392 BC without setting foot on the track. In chariot racing the owner of the horses was the official winner, so she won by owning the best team.
The revival: 1894 to 1912
Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee on 23 June 1894, with the Greek writer Demetrios Vikelas as its first president. The first modern Games came two years later in Athens: 241 athletes from 14 nations in 43 events, all of them men.
Women first competed in Paris in 1900. On 11 July, British tennis player Charlotte Cooper became the first woman to win an individual Olympic title. Coubertin was not a fan. In 1912 he described a women's Olympics as "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic" and improper, a view he never fully let go of. It took until Paris 2024 for the IOC to allocate exactly half of its athlete places to women, 5,250 each.
The Olympics have always told a story about the world as it should be, while reflecting the world as it was.
Amateurs, and the man who paid for being paid
For most of the 20th century the Games were open only to amateurs, an ideal that in practice favoured the wealthy, who could afford to train without being paid. Its most famous victim was Jim Thorpe, a Native American athlete who won the pentathlon and decathlon at Stockholm in 1912. The next year he was stripped of his titles after it emerged he'd been paid small sums to play minor-league baseball. The IOC named him co-champion in 1982, after his death, and only in 2022 restored him as the sole winner of both events. Professionals were gradually admitted from the 1980s onward, and today the amateur rule is gone.
The Games and politics: inseparable from the start
The IOC has long said the Olympics should stand apart from politics. History disagrees.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1936, Berlin | The Nazi regime staged the Games as propaganda. Jesse Owens, a Black American, won four golds (100 m, 200 m, long jump, relay). He later said it was his own president who never congratulated him. |
| 1968, Mexico City | Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists on the 200 m podium; silver medallist Peter Norman of Australia wore a human-rights badge in support. Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Games; Norman was reprimanded at home. |
| 1972, Munich | Members of the Palestinian group Black September took Israeli team members hostage. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and one West German police officer were killed. |
| 1976, Montreal | Over two dozen African nations boycotted after the IOC refused to ban New Zealand, whose rugby team had toured apartheid South Africa. |
| 1980, Moscow | Around 60 countries stayed away, following a US-led boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. |
| 1984, Los Angeles | Fourteen nations, led by the Soviet Union, boycotted in return. |
The Owens story itself has a well-known myth attached. It's often said Hitler snubbed him personally. The record is murkier: after the IOC told Hitler to congratulate every winner or none, he stopped attending medal presentations, and Owens himself said Hitler didn't snub him. Back home he got a ticker-tape parade, but he was never invited to the White House and struggled to make a living afterwards.
The money: who pays, who profits
Hosting is a gamble that cities usually lose. Researchers at Oxford led by Bent Flyvbjerg have found that every Olympics since 1960 for which they could find data ran over budget, by an average of 172% in real terms. Montreal 1976 became the cautionary tale: the city took about thirty years, until 2006, to pay off its Olympic debt.
The counter-example is Los Angeles 1984. Voters there had barred public money from funding the Games, so organizer Peter Ueberroth ran them largely on private money, television rights and corporate sponsors, reusing existing stadiums. They ended with a surplus usually reported at around $230 million, though estimates vary. It's the model the IOC has since pushed cities toward.
The IOC itself is funded mainly by television. For 2017–2021, it reported $7.6 billion in revenue, about 61% from broadcast rights and 30% from its top sponsors. It says it passes 90% of that on to the wider sports movement; outside analysts dispute how that figure is calculated. Athletes themselves, the reason anyone watches, receive no prize money from the IOC; some national committees pay their medallists.
So what are the Olympics?
The case against is real: cost overruns, displaced residents, recurring doping crises, a governing body that critics say answers to too few people, and a history of lending prestige to authoritarian governments. The case for is real too: one of the very few events where nearly every country on Earth shows up in the same place, where a sprinter from a tiny nation can share a stage with a superpower, and where many sports and athletes get their only global audience.
Both are true at once, which is what an honest history of almost anything looks like.
The takeaway
The ancient Olympics ran for over a millennium, though their famous 776 BC start date is partly legend and their first female champion won as an owner, not an athlete. The modern Games, revived by Coubertin in 1896 with 241 men, took until 2024 to reach equal places for women, punished Jim Thorpe for being paid, and have been entangled with politics from Berlin to the Cold War boycotts. Financially, almost every host has overspent, often badly, while broadcasting has made the IOC rich. The ideals are real, and so are the asterisks.
Try this: next time the Olympics are on, look up how much the host city budgeted when it bid and what it actually spent. Then decide for yourself whether it was worth it.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Ancient Games, Coroebus and the 393 AD end date: standard histories summarized in Britannica and the Wikipedia article "Ancient Olympic Games." Kyniska's victories (396 and 392 BC): Pausanias; see The Conversation, "Hidden women of history: Kyniska, the first female Olympian."
- IOC founding (23 June 1894) and the Athens 1896 figures (241 athletes, 14 nations, 43 events): olympics.com.
- Charlotte Cooper's 1900 title and Coubertin's 1912 remarks on women: the Olympic Museum; English translations of the quote vary.
- Origin of the Olympic creed in Bishop Ethelbert Talbot's 1908 sermon: multiple Olympic histories; exact dates and wording differ by source.
- Jim Thorpe's reinstatement as sole champion: IOC announcement, 15 July 2022.
- Berlin 1936, Mexico City 1968, Munich 1972 and the boycotts: standard histories; boycott counts vary by source.
- Flyvbjerg B., Budzier A. & Lunn D., "Regression to the tail: Why the Olympics blow up," Environment and Planning A (2021; preprint 2020).
- IOC revenue 2017–2021: IOC Marketing Media Guide, Paris 2024. Paris 2024 gender quota: IOC, 2022.
Go deeper
- 🌐 Olympics.com: Athens 1896 (the IOC's official record of the first modern Games)
- 📘 Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics — Jules Boykoff (a critical political history, from 1896 to the present)
- 📘 Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup — Andrew Zimbalist (the economics, for and against)