After 1,611 years, Olympia has Olympic moment

ATHENS — It's hard to say just who would be most astonished if the people from the ancient Olympics and the modern ones were to somehow meet.

We came as close to that meeting as is humanly possible Wednesday in Olympia, the ancestral home of the Games, when the men's and women's shot-put competition of the modern Athens Olympics took place on the dirt stadion that lies amid the unearthed ruins where the first 293 Olympics took place from 776 B.C. to 393 A.D.

Throughout those 1,169 years, every August people from first Greece, and then the entire Roman Empire, would flock to Olympia, a city about 200 miles southwest of Athens, to honor Zeus and watch the swiftest and the strongest compete in footraces, javelin and discus throwing, long-jumping, wrestling, boxing and chariot racing.

But not, interestingly enough, the shot put, which became the chosen event for Olympia because it would do as little damage as possible to the ancient dirt.

For authenticity, they would have held the 200-meter run on the course that measured 192.27 meters in ancient times. But no one runs on dirt anymore, and a new rubberized track for one race would have been about as frivolous as erecting, say, a 40-foot-high golden statue to Zeus.

The idea to hold one official event in Olympia was a tribute to the good old, old days, not an attempt at moving the entire movement backward two millennia. There are 301 events awarding medals in the Athens Games — 299 in Athens and the two in old Olympia.

But it was nice to recall when sports was as paramount, in its own way, as it is now.

As serious as the ancients were about sports — evidenced by the massive ruins that were once Olympia — they went about it in a different way. Take the stade run, for example, which was the first known Olympic event and remained the showcase event when others were added to the program.

In Olympia the distance was 192.27 meters, but at the other places where ancient sports spectaculars were held — in Corinth, Delphi, Nemea and Athens — the distance varied. This was because each course was literally 600 feet — the person measuring the course stepped toe-to-heel 600 times.

Because there were no stopwatches, no times were kept, only a register of the victors.