The current Olympiad is the thirtieth. But this is a modern Olympiad. Antique Olympic games were held about three hundred times! Do you know what happened to this sports festival then, in the year 394? Olympiad strangely fell into the category of pagan rites! And with a slight movement of the hand of the Roman emperor Theodosius the First, the Olympic Games were covered for one and a half thousand years. 02. But even then, in the 19th century, the idea to resume the Olympic Games on an antique model was met with very skepticism - it was not clear where to get money from, how to choose decent ones, and so on. As a result - a useless organization, poor discipline of athletes and judges, and the constant change of sports. What they were just not a hundred years ago - they jumped from a place in height, swam between logs and boats, pulled the rope, played cat and mouse ... No, it did not come to cat and mouse, but everything else was fun and easy. 03. By the way, the first General Secretary of the International Olympic Committee, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, saw the modern Olympic Games as competitions of amateur sportsmen only. And even the trainers worked exclusively for the idea. American Jim Thorpe in 1913, even deprived of all titles and medals, when they learned that he played baseball - oh, horror! - for money. By the way, Thorp took part in other competitions, about ten kinds of sports in total, which also perfectly characterizes the Olympiad of a hundred years ago. 04. On the other hand, a bad amateur who does not dream of becoming a professional. Recall at least Eric Musambani Malong from Equatorial Guinea. Journalists from The Times gave him the nickname Eric Eel after he gave the worst scapegoat in the whole history of the Olympic Games in Sydney. The fact is that the Guinean - a) swam a hundred meters for the first time in his life, b) he also saw the 50-meter pool for the first time and, finally, c) learned to swim 8 months before the competition. How did such an eel seeped into the Olympics? And there is, it turns out, a special quota for developing countries. Truly, not victory is important, but participation! By the way, Eric is still lucky.
