Festival first, sport second
The games were a religious festival of Zeus before they were athletics: held at Olympia — a sanctuary, not a city, in the western Peloponnese — around a colossal altar of sacrificial ash, and later beside Phidias’s gold-and-ivory statue of the god, one of the Seven Wonders. The traditional founding date of 776 BC rests on victor lists compiled centuries later (archaeology suggests the festival is older), but the four-year rhythm became Greece’s shared clock: historians dated events by Olympiads, and the games outlasted every state that competed in them.
During the festival the ekecheiria — the sacred truce — guaranteed safe passage across warring Greece for athletes and pilgrims (it protected travellers rather than pausing every war, and violators paid famous fines). Tens of thousands camped in the summer heat: the games were simultaneously the Greek world’s fair, diplomatic summit, and hiring hall for poets and sophists.
The programme
Events accreted from the original single sprint (the stadion, about 192 metres — its victor named the whole Olympiad): longer runs and the race in armour; wrestling, boxing (leather thongs, no rounds, no weight classes), and the pankration — near-anything-goes combat whose lore includes the champion Arrhichion, who won posthumously, his opponent submitting as Arrhichion died; the pentathlon; and the aristocracy’s showcase, chariot racing, dangerous enough that the crown went to the horses’ owner — the loophole by which the Spartan princess Kyniska became the first female Olympic victor without setting foot on the course. Athletes competed naked, oiled, and — for the prize itself — for nothing but a wreath of wild olive: the amateur ideal later ages projected onto this is romance, since home cities showered champions with fortunes, pensions, and free dinners for life, and stars like the wrestler Milo of Croton lived as celebrities.
Women could not compete, and married women — on pain of death by the sources, one priestess excepted — could not even watch; unmarried girls ran their own festival for Hera, the Heraean Games.
End and afterlife
The games survived Persian invasions, Roman conquest, and Nero’s notorious guest appearance (he fell from his chariot and was crowned victor anyway; the judges’ bribes were later refunded), but not the empire’s change of religion: under Theodosius I, whose edicts against pagan cult closed the sanctuaries around 393 AD, the games end — the exact final Olympiad is uncertain — and earthquakes and floods buried Olympia itself until excavation began in the 1870s. The revival came through Pierre de Coubertin at Athens in 1896, importing the name, the four-year rhythm, and a heavily edited memory; the truce, the wreath, and the flame have been re-invented tradition ever since — history’s most successful festival, on its second thousand years.