Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined today by staff writer Joshua
Speaker 1: m Clark. How's it going, josh, Let's going well, Candice?
Speaker 1: How are you fabulous? So? Candice? I know you and
Speaker 1: your fiance still love to run marathons? Right? Do you
Speaker 1: watch the Olympics? Are you excited about the Olympics coming? Well? Okay,
Speaker 1: I have a question for you today about some of
Speaker 1: the early Olympics. The first Olympics, Um, the first recorded
Speaker 1: Olympics was what's right? Okay, But there's evidence that it
Speaker 1: goes back, you know, two fifty years before that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to like Greek god times when the zoos battled it
Speaker 1: out and became king of the gods because he won
Speaker 1: an Olympic events. And most of the evidence we have
Speaker 1: is just legend, and we've had to discern you know,
Speaker 1: what happened originally from just looking at pottery basically, right,
Speaker 1: and a couple of poems written by people like Pliny
Speaker 1: the Elder, Right, Okay, But but ultimately, um, we we
Speaker 1: know that all of these legends, all these descriptions all
Speaker 1: go back to the Olympics being started as a tribute
Speaker 1: to Zeus, the god of gods on Mountain Olympus. Right, okay, Well,
Speaker 1: so with the Olympics. Originally, UM, it was a one
Speaker 1: day event and it was actually just a single event,
Speaker 1: the stadium race, okay, which is them running six feet
Speaker 1: and it was one day. I can't imagine that took
Speaker 1: very long to to to hold that event, but UM
Speaker 1: ultimately it caught on in such popularity that all these
Speaker 1: generally warring city states that neighbored one another UM would
Speaker 1: take on an Olympic truce during the Olympics and all
Speaker 1: fighting would stop, all feuds would be off, so that
Speaker 1: these UM Olympic athletes could come into Olympus where they
Speaker 1: held the Olympics. Right, logically enough, UM and UM compete
Speaker 1: for that one day. So they took it pretty seriously.
Speaker 1: Right now, I've I've read your article pretty thoroughly and
Speaker 1: I loved it on how how the first Olympics worked.
Speaker 1: But I noticed that it was very male centric there.
Speaker 1: There wasn't too much talk about women, and I had
Speaker 1: heard that UM women actually were very much discouraged from
Speaker 1: you know, even watching the Olympics, that they could be
Speaker 1: killed for doing so. Is that fact or is that fiction?
Speaker 1: Can you clear that up? That's actually a fact. Young
Speaker 1: virgins could watch the Olympic events, but married women absolutely
Speaker 1: were forbidden, and the punishment for sninking in and watching
Speaker 1: the games was actually death. Women were hurled off the
Speaker 1: pinnacle of Mount Type Hand, which stands about four ninety
Speaker 1: feet high. And there's actually a pretty famous legend about
Speaker 1: Collie Pittera who trained her son to compete in the Olympics,
Speaker 1: and she herself came from a long line of Olympic victors,
Speaker 1: and she snuck in. She was determined to watch her
Speaker 1: son compete, and when he won, she was so excited
Speaker 1: that she ran forward to congratulate, and her clothes were
Speaker 1: ripped off of her in the process, and obviously it
Speaker 1: was revealed that she was a woman, but because again
Speaker 1: she had such Olympic routs, they decided to pardon her.
Speaker 1: And there's actually no archaeological evidence that anyone was thrown
Speaker 1: off the mountain. I guess they were looking for bones
Speaker 1: at the base of Taipeian and they couldn't find them,
Speaker 1: but women pretty much stayed away. They learned their last time.
Speaker 1: Would do it for me it's yeah, pretty high. And
Speaker 1: also toward the eighth century, a lot of the athletes
Speaker 1: started competing naked. And maybe this was for momentum or
Speaker 1: or you know, less traction when they were running, but
Speaker 1: also it could have been an effort to discern whether
Speaker 1: the competitors were men or women competing in disguise. I
Speaker 1: imagine it just felt good. Yeah, you know, I get
Speaker 1: the breeze in there. So if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about the First Olympics, you can read How the
Speaker 1: First Olympics Worked on how stuff works dot com for
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