A Skeptic Attends the First Modern Olympics

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

The Olympics stir a sense of patriotism in me that’s surprising in its ferocity. For the past month, my social-media feed has spilled over with clips of Sha’Carri Richardson’s face crumpling with emotion after dominating the 100-meter dash in the trials; Katie Ledecky slicing through the water in the 1500-meter freestyle prelim, nearly 20 seconds ahead of her competitors; Simone Biles limping onstage before nailing a Yurchenko double pike on the vault. I loop back to the precise moment when they realize victory is theirs: The announcers ring in their triumph as the music swells and their loved ones collapse in tearful hugs.

Last Friday, the games began in Paris with a spectacular opening ceremony on the Seine. Along with millions of Americans, I have been tuning in, embracing the marathon of emotions the games bring. I want gold; I want it viciously. Though I’m not usually one to participate in anything more athletic than checking my step count, I’m moved by a feeling, however irrational, that our Olympians are an extension of the country as a whole, representing the best of what we can become.

Not every generation of spectators has shared this level of excitement. In 1896, a curmudgeonly classics scholar covered the first modern Olympics in Athens for The Atlantic; the games drew around 250 athletes from 14 countries (this summer’s games include approximately 11,000 athletes from more than 200 countries). Basil L. Gildersleeve endured a long journey on a steamer from New York to Naples, visited some cultural sights in Sicily, and took in Greece’s coastline before trekking to Athens, a city he expected to be “vulgarized by the crowds.”

Gildersleeve was convinced that the modern games could not retain their ancient spirit. One version of the Olympics’ creation myth involves three warring leaders in ancient Greece; together, they brokered the Olympic Truce, which called for temporary peace among city-states while friendly sports competitions took place in Olympia, a sanctuary site dedicated to Zeus. To mark the start of the games, ancient Greeks offered religious offerings to the gods, and athletes vowed in front of an altar to Zeus that they would not cheat. “Religion hallowed athleticism; it hallowed the Olympic games,” Gildersleeve wrote. If the spiritual element eroded, and the Olympics became “a mere show,” then “it would be not only a sham, but a horror.”

When Gildersleeve finally arrived in Athens, it was right as the games were ending. A Greek had won the marathon, which was one of two events that Greece had pinned its hopes on. The other was discus, but that was won by an American: Robert Garrett, a “long-armed athlete who had never seen a discus, let alone thrown one, but who decided to enter the event just for the sport of it,” according to gold-medalist hurdler Thomas P. Curtis, who documented his time at the 1896 Olympics in The Atlantic.

“Proud as we Americans were that our man had beaten the Greeks at their own discus, still there was a touch of sorrow blended with our pride,” Gildersleeve noted. He found Greek patriotism to be “strangely contagious,” and noted that “there was scarcely a foreigner who did not hope for Greek success in the things that belonged especially to the Greeks.” (A newspaper he read in Athens described Garrett as “the terrible Olympic victor.”) In the late 19th century, the Olympics were still seen as a decidedly Greek event, though the Greeks’ sense of proprietorship would be challenged decades later, when the games took off as a sporting event popular enough to induce a worldwide patriotic fever.

Of course, as the patriotism of participating countries strengthened, so did opportunities for virulent nationalism and violence. In 1945, George Orwell declared that international sporting competitions—specifically referencing the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany—bred “orgies of hatred.” There is no shortage of examples to prove his point. Look back to 1972, when a group of Black September terrorists killed 11 Israeli Olympians and coaches, or to 1987, when North Korea bombed a flight, killing all 115 people on board, in part to sabotage the games to be held in South Korea the following year. Though the Olympics have tried to embody a spirit of international unity and sportsmanship, the fact remains that these games—and which countries are allowed to play in them—have never been and can never be divorced from global politics.

To critics, the realities of war and conflict make the Olympics a distraction; to fans, it makes the opportunity to root for excellence and commiserate with compatriots all the more necessary. Gildersleeve ultimately fell somewhere in the middle, between cynicism and enjoyment. Though he may have started off his journey doubtful about the games, his ornery attitude couldn’t help but soften in the wake of the celebratory outpouring that the games inspired. All over Greece, long after the prizes were awarded and hands were shaken, young people competed in their own makeshift races and shot-put competitions. “I cannot forget … the sudden revelation that I had been the victim of my own pedantic ratiocination,” Gildersleeve recalled after the Olympics. “I have seen the light of battle on the soldier’s face, but I have never seen faces more brilliantly illuminated than the countenances of the throngs that pervaded the streets of Athens.”