Relay runners are currently carrying the Olympic torch to Paris. As the 2024 Olympics approach, the debate over how much countries spend on their Olympic teams is heating up again. My home country, Australia, spent a mind-boggling €800 million to lure elite athletes to Paris. This is several times more than our government spends on non-elite sports in our schools and communities. This means each gold medal won by Australians at the Paris Olympics will carry a price tag of tens of millions of euros.
Olympic athletes and their managers believe this is money well spent. Indeed, the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) continues to lobby for increased public funding. For those heading to Paris, the value of an Olympic victory is enormous and blindingly obvious. But to others, €800 million may seem like a waste. Public funds are scarce and could be better spent on doctors, nurses and PE teachers.
In Australia, funding for the Olympic team is hotly debated not just on kitchen tables and office water coolers, but among politicians as well. The debate is now international, as other countries such as Germany and China also heavily subsidize Olympic teams. This is the main reason why modern Olympic athletes have to fight hard for gold medals.
Missing from this important discussion is a cost-benefit analysis. For example, AOC rarely details how she will benefit from Olympic success. A promising way to advance this long-standing debate lies in the lessons of history. Understanding the value of past Olympic victories will help you understand what it is like today.
Of course, it was the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin who founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Paris in 1894. Two years later, in 1896, the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens. 130 years have passed since then, and the Olympic and Paralympic Games have become the world's largest secular event. As impressive as the modern Olympics are, they are still only a small part of a much longer and much older Olympic history.
The ancient Greeks held the Olympic Games for 1,000 years. Their Olympics attracted athletes from his 1,000 city-states across the Greek world. The ancient Greeks also had clear views on the value of Olympic victories. Studying the history of this ancient Olympic Games can provide new insight into what can be gained from the success of the modern Olympic Games.
The ancient Greeks would have been completely surprised by the large state subsidies for Olympic teams. Scarce public funds were wasted on inviting athletes to the Olympics. Families were privately paying for physical education teachers, so people were gearing up for the Olympics. Olympians paid for their Olympic tickets and expenses during the Games themselves.
Nevertheless, the ancient Greeks valued Olympic victories more highly than we do. Each Greek city-state offered Olympic winners free meals and front-row tickets to local sporting events for life. These were the highest civic honors a Greek could bestow. Otherwise, it was given only to victorious generals. That they were given to Olympians shows that the ancient Greeks believed that such victors would bring great benefits to the nation.
National Olympic committees, such as the AOC, may not always be good at spelling out the benefits of Olympic success. But the ancient Greeks certainly did. For example, in a legal speech about the Olympics in 416 BC, his son explains why his father entered his team of seven, an unprecedented number, into the Olympic chariot competitions. He did so because he realized that “the city-states of the victors had become famous.” The speaker explained that the Olympian is understood to be a representative of his homeland. As a result, their victory was carried out “in the name of the city-state before the whole Greek world.”
What made the Olympic victory so valuable to the ancient Greek nation was its international visibility. The ancient Olympics attracted 45,000 spectators and were probably the largest event in the world. This meant that whatever happened at the Olympics would be known to the entire Greek world as ambassadors, athletes, and spectators returned home and reported what they saw.
Greek countries took full advantage of this opportunity to gain international recognition. This is evidenced by the surprising discoveries made by modern archaeologists at the religious site where the Olympic Games have been held for 1,000 years. The sanctuary was closed in 435 AD when the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius II banned all remaining non-Christian worship. Olympia was soon abandoned and slowly covered with several meters of silt from a nearby river. In 1874, Germany signed a contract with Greece to excavate this lost site. The deal guarantees for the first time that artifacts discovered during excavations abroad will remain in Greece. The terrible desecration of the Parthenon by the Englishman Lord Elgin will never again occur.
The ancient Greeks would have been completely horrified by the state's heavy subsidies for the Olympic team
German archaeologists discovered the heart of the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia in just eight years. Among their discoveries were the foundations of hundreds of statues honoring victorious Olympians. The inscriptions on these bases most often advertised the name of the victorious nation. Some said his hometown had installed a statue. However, German archaeologists also discovered that the ancient Greeks also built many monuments at Olympia commemorating their military victories over each other.
For the first eight years of excavation, they decided not to excavate the Olympic Stadium itself. This had to wait for a later dark milestone in Olympia's rediscovery: the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It is still shocking that the Nazi regime used ancient Greek sports for international propaganda. As part of this propaganda, the Olympic Torch Relay was devised, a ritual we take for granted today. This is almost entirely a Nazi invention, since such a relay did not exist in the ancient Olympics.
The German dictator paid for the stadium's excavation with his own discretionary funds. Adolf Hitler was not disappointed by the thousands of weapons and armor discovered by archaeologists. In ancient Greece, trophies for military victories consisted of such items nailed to sticks. The ancient Greeks always installed such trophies on the battlefield. What Hitler's archaeologists discovered was that the ancient Greek states had installed double military trophies in the Olympic stadium itself.
Of course, the IOC encourages us to view the modern Olympics as a means of promoting world peace. However, these discoveries at Olympia show that this modern ideal does not apply to the ancient Olympics. The ancient Greeks apparently used them as a means of advertising their success in sport and war.
So many Greeks participated in the Olympics that the entire Greek world could see through one of the Olympians that the Greek nation had achieved a sporting victory. Such sporting victories brought rare international fame to an otherwise unimportant city-state. For regional powers, it became incontrovertible evidence of the status they claimed in relation to their rivals.
The only other way for the Greek state to rise in the international rankings was by defeating rival states in combat. However, the outcome of the battle was always uncertain and could cost thousands of civilian lives. Thus, the ancient Greek state decided that its citizens who won the Olympics deserved the highest national honor because they had elevated their status and had done it without their fellow countrymen risking their lives in war.
Understanding the benefits of the ancient Olympic success in this way helps us understand what it would be like in our world. This advances an important contemporary debate about whether large state subsidies for Olympic teams are justified.
Today, we still consider Olympic athletes to represent our countries and are still part of the international system of competitive nations. Therefore, an important lesson from the ancient Olympics is that international sporting success can improve a nation's international standing. Therefore, the ancient Olympics provide a justification for spending large sums of money on Olympic teams.
Still, these similarities should not be pushed too far. For better or worse, we are no longer the ancient Greeks, and sport and war are no longer the only things on the international stage. New bodies such as the G20, OECD, and World Health Organization also rank modern nations in terms of health, education, and participation in non-elite sports. In this new world order, we will only maintain our international rankings if we spend just as much money on doctors, nurses and PE teachers.
David M. Pritchard is an ancient historian at the University of Queensland in Australia and the author of Sport, Democracy and War in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press). These are excerpts from the Alex Kondos Memorial Lecture that he will soon deliver in Australia.
