"Olympic" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

Welcome to the Endless Knot! It’s the 100th anniversary of the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, and though the 2020 Olympics have been postponed until 2021, we thought it was time to explore the world of amateur sports and its etymologies!

The story goes that the ancient Greek Olympic games were revived by the vision of Pierre de Coubertin, almost single-handedly. Except that’s not entirely true. However, many other people have covered the complicated stories of the multiple Olympic movements of the 19th century. What we’re going to look at is the connections between the ancient and modern games, and in particular the Olympic vocabulary that can be traced back to ancient Greek, and also consider in what ways the ancient and modern games differ, and what amateur sport really means. And along the way, we’ll see that 1920 was a year of many ‘firsts’ worth marking with a medal or two!

But we won’t start with the first modern games in 1896 or with the ancient Olympic games, though later we will touch on the former and go into some detail on the latter. Instead we’ll start with the 1920 Olympics held in Antwerp, Belgium, one hundred years before the release of this video. There were a number of interesting firsts at this Olympics, for instance the first use of the Olympic flag. The design of five interlocking rings, each of a different colour, meant to symbolize the five continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and America, with at least one of the colours being found in every national flag in the world, was designed, at least in part, by Coubertin. Now, it had been reported at one point that the Olympic rings were derived from the ancient Olympics. In the late 1950s, American authors Lynn and Gray Poole saw a stone with five interconnected rings carved into it at Delphi, Greece, home of the famous Delphic Oracle, where another ancient pan-Hellenic event, the Pythian Games, was held, and thus reported in their 1963 book History of the Ancient Games that the Olympic rings design had an ancient pedigree. But in fact, years earlier, the president of the 1936 organizing committee, Carl Diem, wanted to hold a torchbearer’s ceremony at the stadium of Delphi, to be followed by the relay carrying the flame from there to Berlin where the Olympics were being held. So Diem had a milestone created with the Olympic rings carved into it, but it was never removed after this ceremony, and it was this milestone that Lynn and Gray Poole saw and took to be of ancient provenance. So it was a modern myth, not an ancient one.

In a somewhat more dubious first, the 1920 Olympics were the first in which women’s involvement was not enlarged in some way. In the very first Olympics in 1896 in Athens, no women were allowed to compete, and this resistance to women athletes was in no small part due to Coubertin’s sexist attitudes. He saw the revival of the Olympics as being for the purpose of “the rare and solemn glorification of the [male adult]” and thought of female athletics as “bad” and “monstrous”. Certainly this misogyny can be seen as well in ancient Greece, though female participation in ancient athletics and even the Olympics turns out to be somewhat more complex than that. Initially anyway, women were not allowed to compete in the ancient Olympics or even be spectators at the event, with the exception of a Priestess of Demeter who was allowed to attend. Supposedly the penalty for women who tried to view the games was being thrown from the cliffs of Mount Typaion, though that never seems to have been carried out, and there is a possibly confused account from the author Pausanias that young women, virgins, were allowed to watch, and there is one story of a boxing champion in 404 BCE named Eukles, from a long line of Olympic athletes, whose mother Kallipteira was his coach and attended as such disguised as a man, but when he won she leaped over the barrier of the trainer’s station exposing herself as a woman. Fortunately she was let off without any punishment in deference to the Olympic pedigree of the family. However, there are a number of women listed in the rolls of Olympic champions. You see for the equestrian and chariot races, the victors weren’t the riders and drivers but the owners of the horses and chariots, they were very expensive after all. And in 396 BCE the tethrippon, the four-horse chariot race, was won by Kyniska of Sparta, daughter of King Archidamos, and she was duly celebrated for it in statues, and other women owners followed. But even more significant is the Heraia games held in parallel at Olympia in honour of Zeus’s wife, the goddess Hera. These games were for girls and young women in different age categories, at least initially, like the Olympic games, just a foot race. And there is some evidence for later athletic games involving girls and young women. In an inscription on the base of a statue erected by Hermesianax honouring his three daughters, he celebrates their athletic achievements: Tryphosa winning the footrace at both the Pythian and Isthmian Games, and Hedea who won the chariot race in armour at the Isthmian Games and the footrace at the Nemean Games, and Dionysia who won the footrace at the Asklepian Games. Those first three events, by the way, along with the Olympic Games, made up the “Big Four” circuit of athletic games in ancient Greece.

To get back to the modern Olympics, in the second set of Games in 1900, a few women’s categories were added, such as golf, tennis, and croquet, and over the years other events were added, such as archery in 1904, figure skating in 1908, and even swimming and diving in 1912. But by 1920, women were still not allowed to compete in the core track and field athletics, so in 1921 French rower Alice Milliat founded the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale and organized Women’s Olympiads starting in 1921 in Monte Carlo. Women’s athletics was finally added to the Olympics in 1928, though to this day, there still isn’t parity between men’s events and women’s events at the Olympics. All of this is somewhat ironic in light of another major event that happened in 1920, the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting most women the vote, and as we’ll see, the year 1920 is significant in a number of other important ways.

In Olympic terms, the 1920 Olympics was also the first to feature the Olympic oath. In that first year, there was just an athletes’ oath, taken on behalf of all by Belgian fencer Victor Boin, with the words “We swear. We will take part in the Olympic Games in a spirit of chivalry, for the honour of our country and for the glory of sport”. Over the years the oath has been modified, for instance downplaying the nationalism, adding a clause about doping and using drugs, and separate oaths being added for coaches and officials, most recently with all three being combined into one unified oath. But this is one element that *does* have a basis in historical fact from the ancient Olympics.

You see there was an oath taken at the ancient Olympics, as we are told by the ancient Greek writer Pausanias. The athletes, trainers, and judges had to swear an oath in the presence of the famous statue of Zeus at Olympia over a sacrificed wild boar that they would commit no offence to the Olympic games, that they have trained for ten months in preparation, and that they will receive no bribes. You see Zeus was, among other things, the god of oaths.

Now, to clarify, Olympia, where this statue of Zeus was located and where the Olympic games were held, is not the same thing as Mount Olympus. Olympia was a small valley and religious site in the region of Elis in the south of Greece on the Peloponnese. Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece located in the north on the border between Thessaly and Macedonia. Mount Olympus was thought to be the home of the twelve Olympian gods, ruled by Zeus. There were in fact a number of mountains named Olympus, and it’s generally believed that the name originally meant “mountain”, probably a loanword from a Pre-Greek language, though an origin from a Proto-Indo-European root *ulu- “to turn” because of its curved summit has also been proposed. So originally everyone probably thought that their local highest mountain housed the gods and called it Olympus, but eventually THE Mount Olympus became the Pan-Hellenic site of the gods, and because Olympia in Elis was the site of an important Pan-Hellenic shine to the chief Olympian Zeus and of the athletic games held in his honour, it also gained that name.

Now the statue in the shrine at Olympia was designed by the famous sculptor Pheidias, who is also known for creating the more than 15 metre tall statue of Athena in the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. Because of the sheer size of the Zeus statue and the weight that would mean, Pheidias didn’t build with marble and cast bronze, but instead gold and ivory over a large wooden framework. This seated statue of Zeus was about 20 meters high (which gives you a sense of how much taller Zeus would have been standing). The wood was kept from rotting and the ivory was preserved with oil by means of a system of pipes that could be activated when necessary. Though the statue did not survive the ancient world, the depictions of it on coins, it’s influence on the designs of other statues of Zeus, and the simply awestruck literary descriptions show that it was no ordinary statue. In fact it was considered one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, along with the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Seven Wonders was a list or series of lists compiled by Greek tourists at least as far back as the 2nd century BCE, and thus included sites within reach of the Mediterranean world. Tourism became possible for the Hellenistic Greeks with the Greek conquest of the known western world by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE, allowing access to the regions of the Egyptians, Persians, and Babylonians. These lists were essentially proto-travel guides, telling tourists what were the sights not to be missed. In Greek the wonders were originally called theamata “sights, spectacles”, but were later referred to as thaumata “wonders, marvels”, and such lists are mentioned in the works of Herodotus and other ancient authors. Our best description of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia is from that Greek writer Pausanias I keep mentioning, who wrote a travel guide of Greece called Hellados Periegesis or Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE. This work was part of the literary genre of periegesis, literally “progress around”, the first real travel guides, and developed from the periplous genre, literally “sailing around”, which were lists of ports and coastal landmarks with the approximate distances between them which sailors could use to navigate. We’ll come back to the travel guide and other genres of travel writing later.

Pausanius also tells us about the origins of the Olympic games. In fact there are numerous different myths about the foundation of the games. In the one given by Pausanius, when Zeus was born, a man name Heracles (not the demi-god hero son of Zeus Heracles) and his four brothers raced at Olympia to entertain the baby Zeus, with the victor crowned with an olive wreath, and this accounts for the four-year Olympic cycle, with a new games being held every fifth year (counting inclusively) representing the five brothers. There’s another myth involving the Heracles we all know and love, as told by the poet Pindar, in which, as one of his labours, Heracles was to clean out the stables of Augeas (which contained a truly epic amount of horse manure), which he accomplished by diverting a river through it. Heracles had worked out a side deal by which Augeas was supposed to pay him for that service, but Augeas afterwards refused because Heracles had kind of cheated by using the river, so Heracles kills him, pillages his land, and takes the spoils to Pisa, not the one in Italy but a town near Olympia, and uses it to establish the first Olympiad in which athletes competed for prizes. Pausanias also tells the story of how, years later, after the games had been abandoned, Iphitos, King of Elis, was instructed by the Oracle at Delphi to restore the Olympic games in order to end a plague that was ravaging the area, and also bring peace to the constant warfare between Elis, Pisa, and Sparta. It is perhaps some small irony that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the postponement of the 2020 Olympic Games, an event that may have had its origin in the ending of a plague. In 1920, when we started our story, the world was suffering from another similar pandemic, the Spanish Flu, but fortunately by then it was beginning to wane after two very hard years, so the 1920 Olympics went ahead. As for war, the only times the modern Olympics have been cancelled were due to the two World Wars, in 1916, 1940, and 1944. Not only did Iphitos’s revival supposedly bring about peace for ancient Elis, but the ancient Olympics also involved a pan-Hellenic agreement that during and around the time of the games no city would attack Elis and safe passage would be granted to athletes and spectators alike to travel there from all over the Greek world, in what is likely the earliest example of sports tourism, just as modern sports fans travel to watch everything from pro sports to the modern Olympics. This practise was called ekecheiria, literally “holding hands” from Greek ekhein “to have, hold” and kheir “hand”, something you should not do in these current social distancing times. Unfortunately it’s not working out as well for us as it did for Iphitos, and Heracles’s Augean Stable money made for a much better shitshow than the one we’re currently living through.

As we mentioned earlier, originally the Olympics had only one competition, a footrace, called the stadion after the track, also called a stadion. This is of course where we get the English word stadium. Runners would run the length of the stadion, which was about equivalent to the modern 200 metre dash. Now the etymology of stadion is uncertain, but there are two possibilities, and perhaps in reality it’s a combination of the two. One is that it comes from stadios “firm, fixed” in reference to the fixed length of the course, from the Proto-Indo-European root *sta- meaning “to stand”, also the source of words such as stand, stay, stable, static, statue, steed, stud, and distance. The other is that it comes from the word spadion meaning “racetrack” from span “to draw” from the Proto-Indo-European root *spe- “to pull, drag”, also source of the word spasm, which may have been altered to stadion by influence of the word stadios. The stadion was not only an individual event but also, later, one of the events in the all-around competition called the pentathlon. The modern pentathlon, by the way, which is based on military skills featuring fencing, swimming, equestrian show jumping, pistol shooting, and cross-country running, is not the same as the ancient pentathlon, which was an athletics event including the stadion, javelin throw, discus throw, long jump, and wrestling. Really, the modern decathlon is more the equivalent of the ancient pentathlon, made up of specifically athletic events. Pentathlon, decathlon, and triathlon, also a modern invention made up of swimming, cycling, and running, are formed from the Greek numbers pente “five”, deka “ten”, and treis “three”, and the word athlon meaning “prize, contest”. The word javelin is not of Greek origin, coming into English from French javelot, probably from Gaulish or else another Celtic language from the Proto-Celtic root *gablakko “fork, forked branch”, traceable back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ghabholo- “fork, branch of a tree”. The Greek word for the event was akonta from akon “javelin, dart”, from the Proto-Indo-European root *ak- “sharp”. Discus comes from Greek diskos, related to dikein “to throw”, the origin of which is uncertain but might come from Proto-Indo-European *deik- “to show, pronounce solemnly”, which is also used in derivatives referring to the directing of words or objects, and is the source of words such as dictate, dedicate, teach, and preach.

As we saw before, the ancient Olympics also included equestrian events, including various chariot races, and various other lengths of footraces. Another event was the Pancration, meaning literally “all-power”, a no-holds-barred fight in which the only things you weren’t allowed to do were eye gouging and biting. Perhaps even more surprising is the Hoplitodromos or hoplite race, in which the contestants ran a double length of the stadion in hoplite armour, including helmet and shield. This was probably the only event in which the athletes wore anything, since in the Classical period the Greek custom was to do athletics naked, hence the words gymnastics and gymnasium which means literally “the place where you do things naked” from gymnos “naked”. Athletes were, however, allowed to tie up their penises to avoid any accidental penis slips! Now the most famous race of the modern Olympics is probably the marathon, but this was not an event in the ancient Olympics. In fact it was invented specifically for the very first modern Olympics in 1896. A friend of Coubertin, French philologist Michel Bréal, who is perhaps better known for his work on semantics, came up with the idea based on the ancient Battle of Marathon. This story changed over the years in various ancient accounts, sometimes with a runner sent from Athens to Sparta to ask for assistance against the Persians, or from Marathon to Athens to announce victory in the battle and then immediately falling dead, but in any case it was a very long distance race based on the length of that legendary run, about 40 kilometres from Marathon to Athens. However, the marathon as it’s run now is about 42 kilometres because in the 1908 Olympics in London the start was fixed at Windsor Castle so the royal children could watch it and the finish line was in front of the royal box at the stadium, and that made the distance 42.195 kilometres. The placename Marathon, by the way, according the ancient Greek geographer Strabo, comes from the Greek word marathon meaning “fennel” because of the prevalence of the plant in that area. The etymology of this word is uncertain, perhaps from a pre-Greek language, though one theory connects it to a Scandinavian word, Old Norse merð, Norwegian merd, and Swedish mjärde, meaning “fish trap” because of the funnel-like shape of both the trap and the flower of the fennel plant.

Now another thing Coubertin and his followers got wrong was the amateur nature of the Olympics. They held that the modern Olympics had to be a competition among “gentlemen amateurs” who received no pay or reward. But this was never true of the ancient Olympics. In fact it’s right there in the word athlete, which comes from that same root we saw in pentathlon, Greek athlon “prize”. Athletes compete for prizes, and often ancient Olympic victors could be rewarded quite handsomely by their home city. And what’s more the very first Olympic champion, as found in records supposedly going right back to the ones established by Iphitos of Elis, was Koroibos of Elis, whose occupation was listed as “cook”, hardly a gentleman amateur. So let’s proceed with the term amateur sport, the supposed fundamental principle of the modern Olympic Games, and see what this reveals, and let’s start with the word sport.

The word sport is actually a clipping of the word disport, and had the original sense of “a pleasant pastime” or “to take pleasure, amuse oneself”, and didn’t develop the specific sense of “an athletic contest” until the mid 19th century. It came into English from Old French desporter “to divert, amuse, please, play”, literally “carry away”, ultimately from Latin dis- “away” and portare “to carry”, from the notion of “carrying the mind away from serious matters”. So sport is actually not a good word to refer to the ancient Greek events, which were actually referred to as agones, as in Olympiakoi agones “Olympic Games”, which really means “struggles” or “contests”, from the Proto-Indo-European root *ag- “to drive, draw out or forth, move”. Greek agones were serious business, not diversions as the word sport implies, and the “contest” part was really important — remember the etymology of athlete. And though athletes and athletic contests occupy a very important place in both ancient Greek society and in our modern societies, they are regarded very differently. Greek athletics come more from the role of citizens as fighters or warriors, with activities which highlighted physical prowess in things like running, throwing, and hand-to-hand fighting, but modern sports like baseball and football come from the playground, kids games made serious for adults. Furthermore, in ancient Greece, athletic pursuits were participatory, whereas in the modern world, and in ancient Rome it turns out, sports are spectator affairs. Greek athletes were citizens, Roman athletes were from the lower classes or slaves, and that sometimes even holds somewhat true today in the notion of athletes who are just “dumb jocks” who can’t do anything else. And the serious sports in our modern world didn’t really exist, beyond the playground or as simple diversions, 150 years ago, and even the athletics we have now are conscious imitations of the Greeks dating back only to the 19th century. In Latin, by the way, sports were referred to as ludi “games, diversions” (from which we get the word ludicrous), from the root root *leid- or *loid- “to play”, perhaps literally “to let go frequently”, or as muneres “gifts or service”, from the root *mei- “to change, go, move”, because the games were generally put on by a rich benefactor, often nominally to honour a dead relative but really to increase the status and prestige of the benefactor.

Now the Latin verb portare “to carry”, from the Proto-Indo-European root *per- “to lead, pass over”, is related to the Latin nouns porta “gate” and portus “port, harbour”, from the notion of “passage”, and we of course get the English word port, both in the sense of “portal, door, gate” and “harbour”. And from port, combined with French passer “to pass” from Latin passus “step, pace” from the root *petə- “to spread”, comes the word passport, from French passeport. But this raises the question, does the port in passport refer to a gate or a harbour? According to Martin Lloyd in his book The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document, “the word ‘passport’ is first found in English acts of law in 1548 and in this context referred to a document which concerned the regulation of soldiers and wars”. It was about giving garrisoned soldiers leave to depart from a fortress or walled city, so more of an army leave pass, and clearly here refers to a town gate. But the Oxford English Dictionary list the first usage in English in 1498 giving safe conduct to an Englishman for his agents and servants. In French, the word was used in 1420 denoting a certificate from the authorities for the free circulation of merchandise, and in 1464 denoting a safe-conduct issued by an authority guaranteeing the liberty and free movement of a person. The important point here is that passports not only served the purpose of allowing movement in or out of a harbour or a country, but also free movement within a country, from town to town. As we’ll see, in some places and at some times passports were also used to control the internal movements of citizens within a country.

Now the concept of documentation permitting a traveller to enter a country is an old idea, much predating the word passport itself. Arguably the earliest surviving example of a passport is in ancient Egypt. According to the Victorian Egyptologist Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, around the year 1500 BCE Egyptians needed to be registered with the magistrates and were given a document of the type required for every ship leaving a port, and there are images in a tomb at Thebes from around 1600 BCE that seem to depict this. Coincidentally, in 1976 the mummified remains of the Pharaoh Ramses II, born just a little later in 1302 BCE, was apparently issued a passport by the Egyptian government in order for him to leave the country for study in France. Apparently the rules required this even of the deceased, but it may also have been an added protection to make sure France returned the mummy afterwards. In the biblical book of Nehemiah, the Persian king Artaxerxes I gave a letter to his official Nehemiah to travel to Judea around the year 450 BCE, granting permission for him to leave and requesting safe conduct in the foreign lands, which he presented to the the local governors upon arrival. This example demonstrates one of the prerequisites for a passport to function: a veiled threat from one large power to another that there will be reprisals if anything were to happen to the bearer of the passport. The Sanskrit treatise on statecraft called the Arthashastra, which was composed and revised between the 2nd c. BCE and the 3rd c. CE, described a system in India in which a superintendent of passports issued sealed passes for people to enter or leave the countryside, and in Chinese bureaucracy as far back as the 3rd c. BCE, passports, called zhuan, including identifying details such as age, height, and bodily features, were required to move throughout imperial counties and through points of control. The Romans, who also loved a good bureaucracy, had a document called a tractorium issued by the Emperor permitting government officials to move throughout the empire. In the middle ages, the average person didn’t move around so much, though ports were considered open trading centres, but it was still sometimes necessary for individuals to travel to the interior of a country for things such as negotiations, so there was a Safe Conduct practise—somewhat reminiscent of that old Olympic agreement to allow Greeks to pass through each others’ lands. There was also the practise of the King’s Licence, granting the permission of the king for an individual to enter or leave the kingdom, generally in the form of a document written in Latin. After the middle ages, the issuing of passports was gradually downloaded to government offices — it was no longer feasible for the King himself to issue all such documents — in England to the Privy Council in the 16th century and to the Secretaries of State in the 18th century, but it still required some connection with the great and the good to obtain the necessary documents. And passport control was not only a matter of keeping foreigners out but also keeping citizens, who might have important skills, in.

By the 19th century, the passport had reached something like our modern passports in function, with a few important differences, but the format was quite different. Instead of the the booklet form of today, the 19th century passport was generally a single large sheet of paper headed by a coat of arms with the text in an ornamental and florid style, and of course no photograph. To obtain one you would simply have to provide an acceptable reference and pay a fee. One of the notable differences is that governments could provide passports to foreign nationals. In Britain, the passport system was generally disliked — what more credentials did one need than simply being an English gentleman, who was of course beyond reproach — but other countries were very strict about their passports. While Britain didn’t require passports of visitors to the country, in France one not only needed a passport to enter, but also to move around within the country, including French citizens. After the French Revolution, passports were briefly abandoned, but due to a rise in crime the passport system was quickly brought back. The passport was an important instrument of government control.

With the Industrial Revolution and the advent of railway networks, the number of tourists shot up, middle class tourists, and the passport system of old was rather clunky in these new contexts, so many countries became rather lax in enforcing the need for passports. It looked as though the whole passports system might have been abolished. And then came the First World War. The war obviously created security concerns which the passport, which had also become a means of establishing citizenship, was well suited to deal with. Though there was the ostensible promise to relax the strict measures after the war, it was really too late and the genie was out of the bottle, so blame WWI if you’re bothered by having to go through the long lineups at immigration control. By this point, the main problem was the inconsistency of passports from country to country, so in 1920 — yes we’re back to that Olympic year 1920 again — the newly-formed League of Nations decided to hold a meeting to sort out this problem, the Paris Conference on Passports & Customs Formalities and Through Tickets. The newly proposed design characteristics included a booklet format with 32 numbered pages, two languages (one the national language and the other French, the standard language of diplomacy at the time), and a size of 15.5 cm by 10.5cm, which should be bound in cardboard, with the name of the country on top and its coat of arms in the middle and the word passport on the bottom. Many of these characteristics remain to this day, with later changes such as machine readable text for optical character recognition in 1980 and biometric passports with an RFID or Radio-Frequency Identification computer chip in more recent years. This level of standardization is remarkable when you consider the different language conventions around the world — eg. the booklet format implies a booklet running from the “front” with writing going left to right, which is certainly not a universal standard for written text around the world. Today, passports are generally written in one or more national languages and either French or English. Passports also often contain a request page near the beginning, in very formulaic language, requesting that the bearer be allowed to pass freely “without let or hindrance” and further requesting “every assistance and protection” should the bearer require it, or words to that effect.

So I suppose broadly speaking we could talk about the passport as part of a broad category of “travel literature”, along with the travel guide, including those early Greek examples of the periplous and the periegesis, as well as all manner of other genres like itineraries, travel logs, and today the travel vlog. The advent of mass tourism not only had an impact on the genre of the passport, but also on the travel guide. The word travel, by the way, attests to the difficulties of travelling before all the developments that made mass tourism possible. It’s related to travail, having the original sense of “to toil, labour”, coming from Latin tripalium, which believe it or not, is a torture device made with three sharp stakes, from tres “three” (obviously related to Greek treis that we saw in the word triathlon) and palus “stake” from the root *pag-, also the source of words such as palisade, peace, pact, pole, and impale. If you’re not a good traveller, this etymology probably makes a lot of sense to you! As for tourism, the word tour is related to turn, coming through Old French from Latin tornus and Greek tornos, both meaning “lathe”, from the Proto-Indo-European root *??terə- “to rub, turn”. The original senses in English were more or less the same as the word turn, “a turn or shift on duty” and a little later “a circular movement”. It wasn’t until the 17th century that it gained the sense of “a travelling or journey from place to place”, and it’s right around this time that we first see the term Grand Tour, referring to a trip a young gentleman would be expected to take as a capstone of his education. The term and the concept come from the expat Roman Catholic priest Richard Lassels, who tutored a number of British nobility, travelling through Italy five times. In his 1670 book The Voyage of Italy, or a Compleat Journey through Italy, Lassels recommends that all young nobles make the Grand Tour of France and Italy so that, through exposure to both the treasures and landscapes of ancient Rome as well as the Italian Renaissance, and to the ennobling society of the Continent, these young men would be fully prepared to assume the leadership position they were expected to take. It was thought to give them the intellectual, social, ethical, and political perspectives they would need. It was all part of the liberal and classical education that was held in such high esteem — after all, the English saw themselves as the true inheritors of classical Roman greatness. The Grand Tour itinerary was soon expanded to include Switzerland, Austria, and Germany as well. Lassels book became the first indispensable “guide book” of this Grand Tour, and a little later Joseph Addison’s 1705 Remarks on Several Parts of Italy joined it.

But over time, especially after the Napoleonic Wars were over, with the advent of mass tourism, a new type of guide book appeared, with much of the pioneering work done by Mariana Starke. Starting with her 1800 publication of Letters from Italy, between the years 1792 and 1798 containing a view of the Revolutions in that country, which was subsequently reworked, reframed, streamlined and expanded over the course of the rest of her life, with such titles as Travels on the Continent: written for the use and particular information of travellers and Travels in Europe for the use of Travellers on the Continent and likewise in the Island of Sicily, to which is added an account of the Remains of Ancient Italy. What set Starke’s travel guides apart from those that went before is that unlike the well-to-do young gentlemen on the Grand Tour, Starke’s target audience were the middle class travellers, often travelling on a budget, and in need of practical advice like recommended routes, inns, and attractions, luggage, passports, and the cost of food and accommodations. To this end, she can be credited with one significant and long-lasting innovation, the star rating system. Actually she used exclamation points instead of stars, but the number of exclamation points, on a one to three scale, indicated how highly recommended something was. In short, her target audience was in significant part women, who might be caring for their families on such a trip. So the fact that she was a woman was both a selling point in that respect, but also opened her up to generally very gendered criticism, especially since she wouldn’t have received that upper class education that men of the day would have had, and this probably also accounts for the scholarly disregard of Starke’s work ever since. Many later editions of her writings were done in concert with the publisher John Murray II. She and Murray collaborated on perfecting her guide. But Murray’s son, John Murray III, who later created the Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers series of travel guides, always denied Starke’s important contributions and innovations to the guidebook genre, claiming he himself invented it—though as you can see, the question of who can claim this particular ‘first’ is much more complicated! What Murray did accomplish was the industrialization of the guidebook, with multiple authors contributing to the series and often not consulted about revisions. And he, along with the contemporary German guidebook publisher Karl Baedeker, cornered the travel guide market. But to bring this back to our earlier topic, this new form of middle class tourism stands in contrast to the upper class travel of the gentry, and this class divide brings us to topic of the gentleman athlete that Coubertin so championed, because modern amateur athletics has its origin in that same upper class educational system, and that’s part of the reason the connection to the classical world is so important.

It was in the private schools and universities that sports and exercise, as part of the 19th century revival of the old Latin phrase from Juvenal mens sana in corpore sano “a healthy mind in a healthy body”, became a part of a well-rounded education. But the leisure to play sports and engage in athletic pursuits was only available to the upper and middle classes. The working classes wouldn’t be able to have the time off work to engage in such activities. What’s more class consciousness and class hierarchy was at its height in the Victorian era, with the upper classes looking down on anything involving physical labour or working for a living, and so they invented this concept of amateurism, lionizing the “gentleman amateurs”. So originally athletic competitions were barred to anyone from the working class, in other words anyone who had to work for a living, including mechanics, artisans, and labourers. If the working class was not allowed to compete, a gentleman didn’t have to suffer the indignity of losing to someone he considered beneath him. This was the original class-based and economic meaning of ‘amateur’ in 19th c. English athletics. And this continued to be a much debated point in the discussions around reviving the Olympics. It was falsely claimed that ancient Olympics were amateur in this sense as well, though there is not a scrap of evidence that this was true — remember the first Olympic champion was a cook. And this is something else that Coubertin and company got wrong. Now this is not to say that there weren’t class prejudices in the ancient world, and certainly being of higher status made it more likely one could participate and succeed in the ancient Olympics, but there was never any such rule. Eventually the English gentlemen were forced to back down somewhat, and the rules only stipulated that an Olympic competitor couldn’t receive payment for their athletics, with no reference to how they made their living otherwise, but this was only a small improvement, as it made it difficult for would-be athletes to train to the level of being able to compete in the Olympics. So this new sense of ‘amateur’ was still exclusionary. The continued prejudices against the working classes led to a series of Workers’ Olympiad held in the 1920s and 30s, and the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (or SASI from German Sozialistische Arbeitersport Internationale) which organized them was formed in, you guessed it, 1920. While Coubertin and his followers let sexist, classist, and racist prejudices direct the organization and principles of the Olympic Games, the Workers’ Olympiads opposed all kinds of chauvinism, sexism, racism and social exclusiveness, and downplayed the nationalistic elements of the Olympics. Much has been claimed about sport as a substitute for warfare, a kind of relief valve for belligerent tendencies, but the Workers’ Olympiads seem to have intended a different approach.

Now more recent instalments of the Olympic Games have done away with this old amateur vs professional rule, allowing professional athletes from professional leagues to take part and other athletes to take endorsement deals from advertisers to fund their training, so younger generations may not even be aware of this old Olympic rule. It is noteworthy then that the word professional comes from Latin professio “public acknowledgement, avowal, promise” from the verb profiteri “to declare openly, profess” from pro “before, in front of” and therefore by extension “in public” and fateri “to acknowledge, confess”, from the Proto-Indo-European root *bha- “to speak”, the source of many English words, but most significantly to our story the word anthem, through Greek antiphona, literally “a voice in return” referring to a kind of call and response singing or hymn, and this reminds us of one of the most nationalistic elements of the Olympics, the playing of the national anthems of the victors, a tradition first started in 1924. Incidentally, there is also an Olympic Anthem or Hymn, first composed for the 1896 Games. As for the word amateur, literally someone who loves something, from Latin amare “to love”, its deeper etymology is somewhat obscure, perhaps coming from the Proto-Indo-European root *ama-, a nursery word with derivatives meaning “mother” or “aunt”, or from the root *am- meaning “to grab”, which interestingly is the root behind Greek omnymi “to swear” and katomnymi “to confirm by oath”, which is the word that Pausanias uses to describe the oath taken at the ancient Olympics. The only separate English word that comes from this root, through Latin amplus, is ample and its derivatives amplitude and amplify, literally “to make ample”, leading us to the last leg of our Olympic tour looking at amateur sport.

Though the words amplify and amplifier go back to the 15th and 16th centuries respectively, their more technical senses come from the early days of radio technology, referring to a device called the Audion, invented by a man named Lee de Forest. You see the Audion was the first triode vacuum tube, which became the key technology of everything from radio to computers until the transistor was invented, but in particular it was the first device capable of amplification, necessary for instance for amplifying a weak radio signal into a sound loud and clear enough to be heard, or to amplify the signal from a microphone into a public address system, at say a sporting event like the Olympics. Except the question is, did he invent the triode?

De Forest was part inventor and part conman, convinced of his own genius and yet willing to steal other people’s ideas — in his college yearbook he answered the question “Why did you come to college?” with the statement “To direct and temper my genius”. In later years he referred to himself as the “Father of Radio” — that was even the title of his autobiography. He idolized Nikola Tesla — that was his answer to the yearbook question “Next to yourself, whom would you prefer to be?” — and set about trying to make his mark on the world of radio transmission that had been kicked off by Marconi when he managed to send a Morse Code “S” across the Atlantic in 1901, though there is some skepticism as to whether what was received was the intended signal or just static—if he did it, though, that was the first transatlantic radio transmission. In putting together his own radio transmission system de Forest needed a radio signal detector for his receiver that was better than the coherer that Marconi was using, and in a visit to the lab of the Canadian-born inventor Reginald Fessenden he saw that his detector was just what he needed, and so he basically stole the idea, “inventing” what he called a responder. Fessenden of course sued. De Forest’s attitude to patents was rather changeable: his own patents were fiercely defended, but the patents of others he simply ignored or got around by making some minor change that probably didn’t really affect anything and claimed them as his own. Now de Forest wasn’t really interested in the business side of things, so he partnered with the less than scrupulous promoter Abraham White with whom he founded the American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company, whose business model was basically to make money by duping the public into buying stock with no clear plan to sell any product. At least it supported de Forest’s experiments. To this end, de Forest and White arranged for a highly visible publicity stunt by erecting a 30 foot tower with the name DEFOREST emblazoned in lights at 1904 St Louis World’s Fair. In a strange coincidence, the 1904 Olympics was held as part of this world’s fair, the second and final time this bizarre pairing happened after the 1900 Olympics was held as part of the World’s Fair in Paris. Both of these Olympics were a flop, with many of the contestants not even realizing that they were competing in an Olympic Games, and they almost killed the Olympic movement after it had barely been started. It had worked out better for de Forest though as his company won the Gold Medal and the Grand Prize for the best wireless system at the St Louis World’s Fair. As for the invention of the Audion, de Forest’s claim was that he got the idea from earlier experiments that he’d been doing on radio waves affecting burning gasses which led him to working with filaments in partially evacuated tubes as a better detector. Essentially it’s a lightbulb. Thomas Edison years earlier had noticed a blackening on the side of some of his lightbulb experiments when the filament broke. Not really knowing what to do with this effect he simply patented it (of course) and forgot about it, but it later came to be known as the Edison Effect. This had interested another electrical engineer named John Ambrose Fleming, who eventually developed the Fleming valve from the effect, which could function as a much improved receiver. De Forrest always denied any influence from Fleming’s design, which was essentially a diode vacuum tube with two electrodes, but regardless of where the idea originally came from, when de Forest added a third electrode to make the triode Audion, the device was now capable of amplification, not just detecting, and that was the device which was so crucial to radio broadcast and receiving, not just of Morse Code but of sound, like voice and music.

De Forest, along with others such as Fessenden and many amateur radio enthusiasts (who were called ham radio operators initially pejoratively, as in ham-fisted), went on to experiment with public radio broadcasting. There is some disagreement as to who made the first broadcast for entertainment purposes. The credit usually goes to de Forest, who on January 13, 1910 made a public broadcast featuring the voices of Enrico Caruso and other Metropolitan Opera stars, and he had as early as 1907 made unpublicized broadcasts of music, though these were all made before the Audion amplifier and so required headphones to be heard. Much later in the 1930s a story surfaced that claimed Fessenden made a Christmas Eve and then New Years Eve broadcast in 1906 featuring speech and music which were announced to amateur and shipboard operators, though there is no earlier account of this, so it’s uncertain whether or not this actually happened, and if it did it may have been more of a demonstration of technology than a broadcast for the sake of entertainment itself. The first regularly scheduled entertainment broadcasts were made by Charles Herrold, starting in July 1912 with regular weekly broadcasts of phonograph records in San Jose. As it turns out, 1920 was an important year for a number of radio firsts, to go along with those Olympic ‘firsts’ I’ve already mentioned. There was a Christmas broadcast on December 2nd at Königs Wusterhausen of speech and music, which was the beginning of public broadcasting in Germany. At the New Street Works in Chelmsford, England, which had been been built by Marconi in 1912 and was the first purpose-built radio factory, British public broadcasting was kicked off with the live broadcast performance on June 15, 1920 of Dame Nellie Melba (for whom Melba toast was named when famed French chef Auguste Escoffier created it for her when she was ill). The first commercial radio station WWJ in Detroit began operations on August 20, 1920. The title of oldest radio station is also claimed by KDKA, which actually began as an amateur experimental station licensed to Frank Conrad in 1916, but made its first “official” broadcast on November 2, 1920, which relayed the results of the 1920 US Presidential Election, the first election after the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote, as you’ll remember. Now you’re probably expecting me to tell you that the first Olympic radio broadcast was also made in 1920. However, though the necessary technology existed in 1920, the first Olympic radio broadcasts weren’t made until the 1924 Games in Paris—while the first tv coverage of the Olympics was in 1936, though they weren’t truly broadcast internationally until the 60’s. The first voice broadcast of a sporting event, by the way, was on April 11, 1921, a boxing match in Pittsburgh. However, there’s another radio first in 1920 that will make it possible for you to travel to 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, whenever they end up taking place—even if that’s in 2021. The world’s first air traffic control, with a control tower, a radio system to relay basic traffic, weather, and location information to pilots, was born February 25, 1920, thus making it safe to travel (along with your RFID passport) to the premiere sports tourism event. And long may that millennia-old tradition of safe conduct to the Olympic games continue—whether you’re travelling ‘first’-class or watching a broadcast!

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