The document provides preliminary conclusions about what the ancient Greek Olympics can and cannot inform us about regarding the modern Olympics. It finds that while the ancient games were smaller in scale and more religiously focused, the modern Olympics have evolved to be larger international events. However, both ancient and modern Olympics shared nationalist displays and the manipulation of athletic imagery for political purposes. The document also notes that experiencing the site of Olympia provides insight but not the full international picture, as ancient athletic festivals existed elsewhere in the Greco-Roman world.

1. Preliminary Conclusions
• The ancient Greek Olympics can inform our understanding of the
modern Olympics only in a limited sense.
o The ancient games evolved at a Olympia as the result of its status as a
religious center (evidenced first by the presence of an oracle of Gaia
on Mt. Kronos and later by the temple of Hera [and Zeus, perhaps])
and its central location uninfluenced by any major polis.) Though
Coubertin imagined a sort of religio athletae, the founding of the
modern Olympic Games are only tangentially related to religion.
o The number of events and the duration of the ancient games was
significantly shorter than the modern games, beginning simply with a
footrace and lasting for one day and ultimately evolving to only five
days.
o Professor Scanlon mentioned some details about the diet of ancient
athletes, but the evidence for this is scant. Ms. Roza Kouvelioti
supplemented this presentation with her own research on the diet of
ancient and modern Olympic athletes and observed that even though
ancient athletes were very interested in their diets as a way of
improving their performance, the dietary habits of modern athletes has
evolved according to changes in nutrition and diet.
o The shared language of the Greeks was a significant element in the
success of the ancient Olympic Games. Ana Szemberska
demonstrated how language functions as a tool of unification in sports
through her presentation “Foreign and Olympic Terminology in Italian
Football.”
o Some of Professor Scanlon’s more controversial arguments concerned
the role of women in the ancient Olympic Games and his belief that
women’s contests were held the day before the official (men’s) games
began. Lindsay Parks Pieper connected the modern gender policies of
the Olympic Movement to the segregation of the ancient games in her
presentation entitled “Is the athlete right or wrong? Gender regulation
in Olympic Sport.” She claimed that the current gender policies,
particularly sex testing and the Stockhold Consensus perpetuates the
notion of female inferiority and is thus detrimental to women’s sport.
• Modern Olympic ideology can inform our understanding of the ancient
Olympics in some sense.
o Today we have the rings and the flame; in ancient times, we had the
images of Hercules competing with Zeus and Pelops and the Centaurs
and the Lapiths. The ancient images, in part, demonstrate the
competition between Elis and Pisa for hegemony over the actual
physical site of the Olympics; modern images can be seen as re-

2. affirming the narrative of twentieth-century Olympism; yet post-
modern imagery strives to collapse the dominant narrative and re-
affirm individual identities. This fragmenting is reminiscent of the
competing images in ancient Olympia.
o In the ancient Olympics, different city-states erected statues to
publicize and emphasize their identity. Modern-day nationalism has
much different and more nuanced forms, as Doiara dos Santos aptly
demonstrated in her presentation entitled “National Identity Narratives
in the Vancouver Winter Olympic Fames 2010.”
o The manipulation of Olympic and athletic ideology was explored by
Teresa Yates in her presentation “Olympic Imagery in Pericles’
Epitaphios Logos.” She discussed the manner in which one finds
verbal images in Pericles’ funeral oration which have strong resonance
with the visual images associated with the Olympics and explored how
Thucydides used this rhetoric to advance his socio-political themes.
o Professor Raschke analyzed the evolution of images on the Temple of
Zeus and in athletic monuments. Ana Popovcic used similar
methodology in her analysis of the images of David in her presentation
entitled “The evolution of art history presentation of strength and the
human body through the example of David.”
• Being in Olympia provides access to a significant element of the ancient
Olympic games, but doesn’t provide the complete international picture.
o There were games all over the Greco-Roman world, and a significant
part of the first week was also spent discussing the various features of
the games in Nemea, Isthmia, and Delphi.
o The Pan-Athenaic festival was another thing we learned about, and
that introduces the whole thing about games for prizes.
o Professor Evangelos Albainidis also looked at the games
diachronically and observed both change and continuity in the games
from their inception to their decline.
o Katharina Schorr’s presentation “German Influence on the Activities
of the International Olympic Academy” was an illuminating
exploration of the rocky path of the foundation of the IOA and the
pivotal role of Germany in its success. She also introduced the
spiritual fathers of the Olympic education movement, an international
community of thinkers including Pierre de Coubertin, Carl Diem, and
Ioannis Ketseas.
o While Prof. Albinidis explored the existence of the Olympic Games in
ancient Turkey, Fatih Dervent discussed the role of the modern
Olympics in Turkey in his presentation “A Brief History of Olympics
in Turkey,” including information about the contribution of minorities
to sports in Turkey, the visits of Coubertin in 1907 and Carl Diem in
1933, Turkish Olympic victors, Istanbul’s bids for hosting the Olympic

3. Games, and the importance of hosting the Olympic Games as a
contribution to national sports, education, and the Olympic movement.
o The issues of holding the ancient Olympic Games at Olympia and the
logistical realities of their occurances were explored by both Professor
Raschke and Professor Albinidis. Similar issues were discussed by the
ancient historian Herodotus; in her presentation “The Olympic Games,
Globalization, and Herodotus’ Histories,” Kourtney Murray gave a
brief overview of the historian’s perspective and complicated the
argument that the Olympic ideals were strictly a Hellenic
phenomenon.