Professor Answers Olympic History Questions

I'm Amy Bass, professor of Sport Studies.

I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Olympic History Support.

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Buckshot0331 wants to know,

is the Olympics today the same Olympics

that the ancient Greeks did?

Absolutely not.

The antiquity games basically focused

on things like running and wrestling, some boxing,

some jumping, where we have so many events

in the modern games, over 200 countries.

We have women competing, almost 11,000 athletes.

And I think most importantly, in the modern games,

the athletes wear clothes.

Alfbridge43 asks,

what were the original ancient Greek Olympic sports?

And the answer to that is simple. It was running.

It was a sprint, one race to honor Zeus.

Game's over.

Twchanda asks,

was cool runnings a true story?

So cool runnings, of course, is the film

made about the Jamaican bobsled team,

and there is a Jamaican bobsled team.

We're actually pretty good now.

And I think that the Jamaican bobsled team sort of has

that cultural hold on everybody

because it is a classic fish out of water story.

There's no snow in Jamaica,

there's no bobsled runs in Jamaica,

but they do have a running culture.

And so that idea of fast runners pushing a bobsled

became that kind of a dream

and thus we have cool runnings.

Jazzlike Garage 2799 wants to know

who's the biggest underdog to win a gold medal?

That I think almost everyone will agree

took place in Salt Lake City in 2002

when Australian short track speed skater Steven Bradbury

won gold.

He was so far behind the leaders,

which was tons of Korean skaters,

American Apolo Anton Ohno,

who was the headline of the Salt Lake games.

They had a massive pile up,

which happens a lot in short track.

It's basically roller derby on ice.

Bradbury was so far behind the leaders that he was able

to avoid and step over the carnage in front of him

to skate across the finish line first.

Everybody else had to crawl.

Ralfjenkins2021 wants to know

what Olympic sport is the hardest?

I think there's two ways to look at it.

There's the skillset sports, and then there's just the,

this is a really hard sport sports.

So decathlon, heptathlon, modern pentathlon sports

where you need to know how to do more than one thing

and do it really, really well are very difficult sports.

And sometimes it doesn't have to be a whole bunch of things.

I think biathlon, a winter Olympic sport

that combines Nordic skiing and shooting

is a terribly difficult sport.

You can't dope for it because anything that you do

to make yourself a faster skier

is gonna hurt you as a shooter.

You are racing, racing, racing,

and then you have to lie down on your stomach

and hit a target.

It's very, very difficult.

But I think then you can flip to the other side

and say just what is a grueling sport?

And I think most people would agree that it's water polo.

You can't touch the sides, you can't touch the bottom.

You are treading water, you are creating power

to score goals with a ball.

You are knocking each other's teeth out.

It is just an absolutely brutal sport.

Hey, a Quora user asks, when were the first Olympic games?

So that question begs for two answers.

The very first Olympic games were 776 BC in Olympia, Greece.

There was one event, a sprint race to honor Zeus.

The Olympics we know, 1896,

Athens launched the modern Olympic games

with about 14 countries competing in a handful of sports.

A Reddit user asks,

what was the biggest mistake made in Olympic history?

For mistakes that the Olympics have made,

I think 2000 Sydney gymnastics setting the vault

at the wrong height is sort of sticks out

above a lot of other errors that have taken place.

The fact that the vault was actually set at the wrong height

and it wasn't until people were crashing out on it.

It's just one of the biggest mistakes in Olympic history.

But then we can look at mistakes that athletes made.

I think that Lindsay Jacobellis snowboarder

is probably going to win unfortunately that race.

In Torino, she was ahead by a lot in snowboard cross

and sort of to celebrate before the finish line

threw a method grab, a little bit of flare and crashed

and everybody passed her, and she lost the medal.

CelticNorseMan2 asks,

what do the rings in the Olympic flag mean?

So the five rings in the Olympic flag

represent the five continents of the globe

and those colors, five colors of the rings

on a white background include a color

from every flag in the world.

CodyTaplin asks,

how TF is break dancing in the Olympics?

Break dancing came and went with the Paris Olympics in 2024.

Australia's Raygun making headlines

for a less than gold medal performance.

And that's part of what the IOC,

the International Olympic Committee does

every once in a while to try to attract a younger audience.

But it has worked in the past.

If you look at sort of the x-gamification

of the winter games with things like snow cross

and halfpipe, we have seen a rise

in those kinds of sort of younger skewed sport.

It was to try to, you know, create the success

of the urban vibe that skateboarding brought

with its launch in Tokyo,

but I don't think it was terribly successful.

Ziz Bird asks, who is the Winter Olympics GOAT?

There's two ways to look at that.

You could do total accumulated medals,

Marit Bjorgen, Norwegian cross country skier,

15 total medals, most decorated in a single Olympic games,

1980 Lake Placid Eric Heiden for speed skating.

Or you can look at what's still to come.

We have GOATs in our midst right now.

Mikaela Shiffrin as a slalom skier,

the winningest World Cup skier in history.

We have Chloe Kim looking to just continue

to be unbeatable, snowboard halfpipe.

So keep your eyes peeled. There's GOATss coming.

ShadeusX wants to know, what prompted the restart

of the Olympics in the late 1800s.

So the launch of the Olympics in 1896 was the brainchild

of Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

And he was a sport enthusiast

who wanted to bring together the children of the world,

understanding that sport was a unifying agent,

physical fitness was important,

and thus he wanted to relaunch it as a global event.

Mr. KWisconsin asks, whoever developed the Modern Pentathlon

was definitely high when they did so.

Not so much a question, more of a statement,

but a pretty accurate one.

Modern Pentathlon was the brainchild also again

of the Modern Olympic founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

And he wanted to bring together a range of skills

that personified what he thought a modern soldier

needed to be able to do.

It's varied over its history.

Fencing, equestrian, running, shooting, swimming.

Sometimes it takes place over three days,

sometimes it takes place in one day,

sometimes they have time limits of two hours.

And one of the keys to being successful

at Modern Pentathlon, you have to be really good

at all of those different things.

Brisbane 2032 asks, when did the Olympics first award gold,

silver, and bronze medals?

And that's a great question because it did not happen

at the first modern iteration of the games.

It was 1904 in St. Louis where gold, silver,

and bronze medals were awarded.

The ancient Greeks did not do medals, they did wreaths.

Spinnable Sports wants to know,

what was the most memorable moment in Olympic history?

Wow, this is a hard one

'cause it depends on what you prioritize.

Recently, Simone Biles in Paris

throwing a Yurchenko double pike on the vault.

First woman to ever land that in Olympic games,

something they couldn't even score, it was so difficult.

Looking at Jesse Owens four Olympic Golds in Berlin in 1936,

you know, so-called Hitler's games,

having a Black American pull that feat off.

But even with those two amazing things,

I think most people would say 1980 Miracle on Ice,

Lake Placid, US hockey team defeating the Soviets

in the semi-final and then going on

to win gold against Finland.

LazyCondition0 brings an excellent question.

Who are some Olympic athletes who dominated their sport

to the same or greater degree

as Simone Biles dominates gymnastics

and Michael Phelps, in his prime,

dominated his swimming events.

One of the things about who dominates the sport

and has the most medals in the Olympics is that some sports

like gymnastics in swimming have a lot of events

that one athlete competes in.

So they accumulate a lot of medals.

But I like to look at an athlete like Al Oerter

who won the discus in four consecutive Olympic games

gold medal over the course of 16 years.

So that's complete dominance.

But he only gets one medal per games unlike Michael Phelps

who always brings home a haul of medals.

For winter games, I would look at Norway's Marit Bjorgen,

15 medals in cross country skiing, eight of which are gold,

the most successful winter Olympian.

But then you wanna look at a single games dominant sport.

And for that I would go to Eric Heiden, 1980 Lake Placid,

five gold medals in speed skating.

He sweeps the sport.

ChristopherMcCraw wants to know

what are the biggest scandals in Olympic history?

And Christopher, there is no simple answer to that question.

We have political scandal, we have doping scandals,

we have bribery scandals.

Good look at Salt Lake City's bid,

which was full of corruption

and sort of changed the makeup of the IOC.

We can look at doping scandals like individual athletes.

American cyclist, Lance Armstrong,

track star from the 2000 games, Marion Jones,

which sort of ripped the lid off

of the entire BALCO drug scandal.

You can look at the Russian doping scandal,

which was systemic, institutional.

So the entirety of the Russian delegation has been banned

from Olympic competition,

not just because of the doping they were doing,

but because of the covering up that they were doing.

And then you have, you know, smaller things per sport.

Again, in Sydney in 2000,

the vault was set at the wrong height,

which meant a lot of people crashed and burned

before someone figured out

that the vault was set at the wrong height.

Big Red Bear 2 asks,

what restrictions were there on visitors

to the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin hosted by Hitler?

There were Black and Jewish athletes from the US

and other countries.

So Berlin in 36 is called by historians,

a facade of hospitality.

The athletes who were competing,

Jesse Owens being of course the standout athlete,

they were almost propaganda tools.

See, we're welcoming everybody.

Look, there's a Black man on the field.

They were not as hospitable to the visitors

that were being welcomed into Berlin.

So a lot of folks experienced discrimination

and hostility upon setting foot as an Olympic spectator

in Berlin.

We have a Quora user asking,

what is the oldest unbroken Olympic record, as of today?

And that one was set in 1968 Mexico City,

American Long Jumper Bob Beamon is the first human

to break 29 feet.

Mike Powell did break that record

for a world record in 1991,

but no one has ever jumped further at an Olympic games.

It is good to put a little tiny asterisk next to that

because the Mexico City Olympic Games took place at altitude

and that literally enabled people to fly.

MajorSpiritual1963 asks, what was the greatest opening

and closing ceremony in Summer/Winter Olympics?

I think Summer Olympics almost always have the edge on this,

winter Olympic opening and closing often take place outside

in winter, which limits a lot of what they can do

which isn't to say we haven't seen some spectacular.

The opening ceremony in Vancouver, for example,

was absolutely a beautiful tribute to Canadian heritage.

I think in terms of spectacle,

however, Beijing 2008 is going to win

just for the absolutely unprecedented synchronicity

that we saw, the tales that came out afterwards.

You know, performers under the stage

for umpteen hours wearing diapers to keep them there.

So once we learned how they did it,

I think it became a little bit less glitz and glam.

But when Beijing 2008 happened, it absolutely blew

every other opening ceremony off the water.

I would also say that we have poignant moments

in opening and closing ceremonies, really beautiful moments.

And for that I'm gonna go to Atlanta 1996

where we see Muhammad Ali take the torch

from swimming legend Janet Evans,

and Muhammad Ali lights the cauldron

and stands before the world

with the Olympic flame over his head.

There was not a dry eye in the house.

BKA004 asks, what's an unlikely sport

that could now have a shot at being an Olympic event?

Olympic events come and go.

They can depend on the host country

and the culture of that country.

We see flash in the pan sports like break dancing in Paris.

We see new sports emerge.

Flag football in 2028, Los Angeles.

That's not an accident.

The NFL is very excited about the growth

of flag football in the United States,

particularly on the girls side.

And then you have new sports like Milano Cortina.

We're gonna see ski mountaineering

where we're gonna be watching people running up a mountain

with their skis and then skiing down it.

So never say never pretty much for any sport.

KangarooKey2017 asks, what age were you when you realized

that curling is the best sport in the world?

I've always known that.

We identify with curling

because it looks like something we can all do.

Those athletes look like us,

which isn't to take anything away

from their skill and athleticism.

You have to remember that everything a curler is doing,

they're doing on ice and they're not falling down

and they're getting a relatively small object

into a relatively small space

over a relatively large expanse of ice.

MCQ 101 wants to know when were women first allowed

to compete in the Olympics?

Women launched their careers as Olympians in 1900

at the second Olympics.

There were five sports, the usual suspects for what's okay

for a woman to do, things like tennis.

We didn't see distant sports for women in the Olympics

until much later.

Actually, distant sports were banned

for women starting in 1960

after a completely fabricated story about women passing out

during the 800 meters, ripped headlines.

And we're not gonna see an Olympic marathon

for women until LA 84.

Women are now dominating a lot for the US team,

but it has been a journey.

Bzh Bastard wants to know why is Fosbury-flop

the most efficient way to do high jump?

Well, when Dick Fosbury launched that flop,

very successfully, everyone thought it was kind of nuts.

But really it's a simple physics equation

where Dick Fosbury was raising the center of his body

and lowering the rest of it to create the arch over the bar.

Before Dick Fosbury, high jumpers looked face forward

at the jump.

Fosbury turns the vertical into a horizontal

and that was a more efficient and better way to jump.

Additional Sky 7436 asks,

what historic Olympic team was the best basketball team?

So I think the obvious answer here for almost everybody

is the 1992 so-called dream team,

the USA basketball team that was just stacked

with NBA professionals.

But I'm gonna counter that a little bit.

Take a look at the women's side from Atlanta to Paris,

they're undefeated, gold medals across 10 games.

That is a dynasty

that should not be questioned in basketball.

AceofHearts2022 asks,

how in the world could the Munich Olympics keep going on

while a massacre was taking place?

So this question refers to the hostage situation

with the Israeli team by the Black September movement

in 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games.

There was a pause in competition,

but IOC President Avery Brundage, a businessman from Chicago

with, I would say, interesting political views,

issued his famous statement of the games must go on.

And thus the games did.

Viera Enjoyer asks,

the USA is one of the most prolific nations in the Olympics.

What factors have led to this dominance?

Well, the United States benefits

from a lot of different weather systems and terrains.

So that makes different kinds of sports,

part of the menu in the United States.

It is a sports crazed country

with a lot of well endowed professional leagues.

And we also have this thing called the NCAA.

So intercollegiate sport in the United States,

which brings a lot of athletes from around the world

to play competitively is a massive training ground

for future Olympians.

James Gyles asks, I wonder how much Olympians of today

would beat the ancient Greek Olympians by?

They'd beat them by a lot.

Nutrition, training, focus,

actual dedicated athlete as a career.

There's no match.

Ellen DaSilva wants to know, serious question:

Okay, thank you.

Does the Olympic torch go through every country

or just the country of the Olympics?

How does it travel over oceans?

So the Olympic torch used to try to go to

as many countries as possible.

And very recently the International Olympic Committee,

the IOC, changed that

because the torch relay route, which used to be a space

where people came out and cheered and the torch ran by

and you took a selfie and that was you with the torch

became a site for protests.

So they'd now tried to limit the torch relay route

between Greece and the host country.

Flwebpro asks, did China clear chronic smog

for the 2008 Olympics using cloud seading

to produce heavy rain?

There was blue sky in 2008 for the Beijing Olympics

and it was primarily because they shut down

their industrial manufacturing segment.

So there were no factories actually in operation

leading up to those games and during those games

and that gave Beijing blue skies.

A Reddit user wants to know,

has someone ever died due to an accident

while doing a sporting event?

And the answer to that, sadly is yes.

Most recently in 2010 in Vancouver on a practice run

on the luge track, a Georgian luger crashed

and unfortunately lost his life.

A Reddit user wants to know, who would you crown

as the greatest track and field athlete of all time?

This is another really tough one.

You have folks like Allyson Felix

who have just accumulated a pile of medals.

You have someone like Wyomi Tyus who in 64 and 68

defended a sprinting title.

The first person to ever do that.

You have people who do 100 and 200 doubles,

200 and 400 doubles. Al Oerter wins discus

again four times in a row.

So over the course of 16 years,

Al Oerter wins gold in discus.

Usain Bolt setting records

that were just untouchable for so long.

Track and field is such an enormous sport.

It depends what event you wanna look at

and what you consider to be the merit for the greatest.

Tee Alkhazin wants to know

how are we still breaking world records in Olympic sports?

In some events, all top three broke the world record.

I think athletes got better at doping

or they're making racing distances shorter.

Well, let's hope neither of those things are true.

We look at sport now as a science,

the technology of sport from nutrition to training practices

to equipment mean that records will continue be broken.

The idea that figure skaters, for example,

are throwing quadruple jumps

was absolutely unimaginable not that long ago.

Naheem says, reading up on the Black power salute in 1968.

How did I not know about this before?

1968, Olympic Black Power protest,

sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos,

American medalist, gold and bronze record breaking,

Tommie Smith was the first human

to run a 200 meters in a sub 20 race,

and they took their moment in the spotlight

to make a stance connected to the Civil Rights Movement.

And you should know it

'cause it should be taught and it should be talked about.

There's a lot of myths about what happened

to Tommie and John post Olympics.

They did lose their Olympic credentials

and they had to go home.

They did keep their medals,

but there were terrible consequences that they faced,

backlash that they faced.

People who really felt that they had ruined sport.

GuyFoxNews asks,

does hosting the Olympics actually pay off?

The short answer is no.

It is wildly expensive

and economically draining to host an Olympic games,

particularly recently where security alone is something

that can just bloat the budget beyond anything

that a city can handle.

It was designed to build facilities, create infrastructure.

And if we look back historically, that is true.

So for example, in 1968, Mexico City,

telecom improvements had to be made to that region

in order for the Olympics to be hosted there.

It was the first time that an American network, for example,

had hosted a wide broadcast.

ABC Sports did 44 hours of coverage of Mexico City.

And that's our first really large scale broadcast

of a games.

That said, today the cost is draining.

So if we look at our next Olympics, Cortina Milan,

you see the Italians trying to reuse as much as possible

from when Cortina hosted the Olympics in 1956.

So today it's much more about sustainability

and reusing facilities rather than build, build, build.

CraftyMerr wants to know,

was they're cheating in ancient sports competitions?

Of course, there's always been cheating.

We've never not cheated at stuff as humans.

We had sabotage in the ancient games.

There was bribery in the ancient games.

Probably tripping.

I don't know. I'm speculating.

But yes, the Greeks absolutely cheated in the ancient games.

Storminpumpkin asks, watching the Olympics,

what countries have rivalries?

All I know is USA rivals.

And that's okay because the USA has a lot of them.

USA-Australia swimming, USA-Canada hockey

is certainly women and men one of the biggest.

There's a lot of rivalries in baseball,

China, Japan, and Cuba. Absolutely.

And then we sort of have the historic rivalries

where if you follow the political lines

of the world at any given moment,

the entirety of the Cold War.

So the Soviet Union and the United States,

Eastern Europe and the United States.

But you also see things like Japan and Korea.

Where North Korea fits in into the Olympic world

is constantly creating sort of us and them binaries.

Jamaica versus everybody in terms of track and field.

You just gotta look for 'em.

Classicpoodle asks,

have Olympics been canceled before?

Didn't the US skip them one year?

Yes. World War I and World War II meant

that Olympic games were canceled too for World War II.

And then we actually have a postponement

if we think not that long ago, Tokyo 2020 became Tokyo 2021,

even though we still called it Tokyo 2020

'cause no one wanted to change the merch.

And there is one games that the United States boycotted,

1980 Moscow, the ultimate Cold War move.

Flash forward four years to Los Angeles,

Eastern Europe returned to the favor

by boycotting on their part.

Boredbouncer wants to know,

did Russia cheat at the Olympics?

The most simple answer to that is yes.

Russia was banned from the Olympics by WADA,

the World Doping Agency

because of systemic institutionalized doping

and an enormous cover-up scheme

so that that doping was not detected.

Russian athletes can still compete in the Olympics,

but they have to compete as neutrals.

That ban was then extended

after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia's fate as an Olympic entity remains kind of blurry.

Key Opinion 1700 wants to know,

many people say most Olympians are doping,

but how do they pass the tests then?

The whole system of doping is that your testing protocol

needs to be one step ahead of the doping protocol.

And quite often that is not the case.

So the pattern of doping, when athletes do and don't engage,

how they may or may not avoid out of competition testing,

in terms of what Russia did, they created an entire system

of neutralizing the tests, switching them out

that was undetectable until there was a whistleblower.

So basically avoiding doping tests

needs to be one step ahead of actual doping,

and that's how you get away with it.

A Quora user asks, can an Olympic athlete refuse a medal?

Technically, no.

You're not supposed to because it's considered by the IOC

to be an insult against the games.

And some athletes have been banned or censured

for behaving inappropriately with a medal,

throwing down a medal.

But really the most significant moment

in which athletes refused a medal is 1972.

The US men's basketball team refused

to accept the silver medal.

And this is one of the most controversial moments

in Olympic history.

It was the Soviet Union versus the United States.

America invented basketball.

This was never supposed to be something

that they could lose.

During that basketball game,

the refs kept adding three seconds back onto the clock

until the Soviets won.

The United States refused to accept the silver

and those medals remain in a vault in Switzerland.

A Reddit user wants to know,

what happened to the full body suits in the Olympics?

So I'm assuming that this question is asking about swimmers

and the so-called Speedo SharkSkin suit.

And that was an incredible technology that took away drag,

which is the swimmer's body going through the water

and added buoyancy.

And after pretty much every record was broken

by anyone wearing one.

FINA, which is the international federation

that supervises swimming and regulates swimming,

said no more and they were banned.

A Quora user asks,

how are the Olympics experienced

before the invention of television?

We almost, I can't think about watching the Olympics

without thinking about the Olympic broadcast.

There's more Olympic broadcast hours in a day

than there are hours in a day.

But we really didn't see those full scale broadcasts

until the late 50s and 1960s.

Cortina, the Winter Games in 1956

was the actual first broadcast of a games.

There were 15 minute snippets from Tokyo in 64.

But 1968, ABC Sports really creates the blueprint

for a massive platform of Olympic programming.

And it was still only 44 hours.

But then 44 hours was a massive undertaking by a network.

Before that, it was old fashioned newspaper, radio

and the radio broadcasts were exciting

and people huddled around the radio

just as they did for any other sports broadcast.

Or you could hop on a plane or a boat

and actually go and be a spectator.

Alright, that's all of the questions for today.

Thanks for watching and I hope you learned something.

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