As you know, the Winter Olympic Games will begin soon in Sochi. We all, of course, know firsthand about them, many even attended. The only catch is that many of us have no idea how they originated and why. I would like to talk about this in a little more detail.
This tradition originated in Ancient Greece. For a very long time, the competitions, in another way they were also called agons, were held in Olympia. And, of course, as a result of which they got the name of the Olympic Games. Little can be said about the first such competitions, since there is no accurate data in history. But the first reliable mention falls precisely on 776 BC. The mention is, of course, not entirely usual. The name of the first winner of this competition was engraved on the marble columns that are installed along the Alpheus River. And there was a cook from Elis - Koreba. At first, the Olympic Games were not a large-scale event. Only over time, they began to gain well-deserved popularity and spectacle. Well, if their scale has increased, then, accordingly, the audience has become much larger. They began to gather from different directions - from the Black to the Mediterranean seas.
Then, in the 6th century BC, people began to organize games like the Olympics, namely: Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean. All these games were dedicated to the gods. But the Olympics, of course, cannot be surpassed. By that time, she had won immense fame. It was a great honor to win on them. And by the way, there are more interesting facts for those who do not know: such famous people as Aristotle, Herodotus and even Pythagoras took part in these competitions!
As you know, in the 4th century BC Greece experienced a cultural decline. This also affected the Olympic Games. Gradually, they began to lose their essence and began to take on a purely entertaining nature of the event, in which not ordinary people competed with each other, but professional athletes. But nevertheless, they did not cease to exist even when Greece fell under the rule of Rome. It was from that moment that not only Greeks, but also people of other nationalities began to take part in the Olympic Games. There is even such a fact in history that the Roman emperor Nero competed and won at the Olympics.
Of course, there were some sad events in the history of the Olympics. In 394 AD, Emperor Theodosius 1 banned the organization of the Olympic Games, considering them a pagan rite. This was the first break in the 1168 years of the Olympics.
There are also many legends about the emergence of the Olympics. The most famous of them all tells how the king of Elis - Iphit, seeing how much the people were tired of endless wars, went to the priestess Apollo, who handed him the decree of the gods. They commanded to arrange general Greek festivals. After such a decree, the Olympic Games in Olympus were created. Olympia was considered a sacred place, so if during the games a person came with a weapon, he was immediately considered a criminal. Also interesting is the fact that during the Olympics, people stopped absolutely all warriors.
As mentioned earlier, the Olympic Games have died out. And the French baron Pierre de Coubertin helped to revive them. He conducted research, during which he discovered that physical education at the moment was not at dawn itself. He wrote a lot of articles on this topic, after which, having studied history, he considered the views of the ancient Greeks on sports education to be very, very close to him in spirit. As a result, he came up with the idea to recreate the tradition of the Olympic Games. Pierre de Coubertin actively began to advance in this matter, after which in 1894 the IOC was created, that is, the International Olympic Committee. And so the first Olympics took place in 1896 in their own homeland.
The final form of the Olympic Games took place not very long ago, namely, in 1986. It was then that the decision was made to alternate the summer and winter Olympic competitions. Here is such a rich history of the Olympics!
