Sadly, very little indeed – beyond the striving for athletic excellence and success, and a dedicated professionalism in the relevant disciplines. Many elite athletes are personally religious in various ways, but the (Paris) Games as such is a secular affair. In antiquity, competitors entered as individuals, for all that their home cities made a huge song and dance on behalf of ‘their’ hometown victors. The ancient Olympics were strictly men-only. The sole way in which a woman could win an Olympic first-prize wreath was by owning a horse or a chariot and team.

The Paris Olympics will be staged not only in Paris, in some cases far outside, whereas every ancient Olympics was staged solely at Olympia. Besides the athletic and equestrian sports, the Paris Games will include a whole host of other sports, some of which – tennis,  skateboarding, breaking – have no even remote ancient ancestors. There were rowing races in ancient Greece, for quite large warships at sea, but not at the Olympics because Olympia was inland.

Traditionally by our system of time-reckoning the first Olympiad (Olympic Games) was celebrated, in honour of Zeus of Mt Olympus, in 776 BC/E. Archaeologists suggest that the actual date was somewhat nearer 700. At first the ‘Games’ consisted of just the one event, a roughly 200-metre dash, for adult men running stark naked. Times were unimportant, winning was the only thing, and for the winner apart from the fame and glory at home and abroad the prize was a wreath (stephanos) made from leaves plucked from olive trees growing in the sacred grove known as the Altis. It was within that grove that all the athletics events – eventually nine in all – were staged: four running races (stade, diaulos = 2 stades, dolichos = 24 stades, race in armour = 2 stades), three ‘heavy’ events (wrestling, boxing and mixed martial arts known as pankration or ‘all-strength’), and pentathlon or ‘five-event contest (stade, wrestling, discus, javelin, long jump). Besides the athletics and heavy events, there grew up alongside – but on a separate track in a separate arena, the Hippodrome – a series of equestrian events involving either horses and individual riders (including dismounters) or teams of horses drawing chariots. In the equestrian events it was the owners, not the jockeys or charioteers, who won the prizes.

Not only could women not compete in the athletics at the Olympics directly, they were forbidden even to enter the Altis! With just one exception, a local priestess of Demeter. She saw it, literally, all. However, women could – were allowed and had the wherewithal to – compete in the equestrian events – not of course as charioteers or jockeys but as owners of chariots and horses (teams or singly). The most prestigious – because most expensive – of all the equestrian events in the Hippodrome was the four-horse chariot-race (tethrippos). In 396 BCE a Spartan woman won it. Not just any Spartan woman but a princess, Cynisca (‘puppydog’), full sister of King Agesilaus II, half-sister of Agis II and daughter of Archidamos II. She was no shrinking violet. As well as commissioning statues of herself and her chariot at Olympia and Sparta she had a message to proclaim: ‘I say I am the first woman in all Greece to win this crown’!

Late sources such as Philostratus (2nd century AD/CE) go into the details of athletes’ training regimes and diets. Meat and fish, both expensive, were recommended by some, while others favoured figs, moist cheese and wheat. Specialist coaches there certainly were, such as Pythagoras (not the philosopher-mathematician). One essential feature of the ancient Olympics was the absolutely obligatory period of pre-Games training, actually at Olympia, during which the judges inspected the would-be competitors and decided on the eventual list of those who would do the business in and around the stadium in the Altis. Part of these preparatory training exercises took place in the Palaestra, literally the wrestling arena.

Yes, and not only in the ‘early’ iterations of the Games, which traditionally by modern reckoning originated in 776 BCE, with just the one ‘event’, a roughly 200-metre dash. In the 5th century BCE the managers of the Games doubled down on nudity, when the mother of a competitor, from a famous athletic family of Rhodes (below), sought to gain entry to a men-only space by dressing as a man but fell over and revealed the anatomical female truth. Thereafter trainers too and not just competitors were required to disrobe completely in the most sacred area. (Just one woman at any one time was ever permitted into the otherwise men-only space: a local priestess of Demeter.)

The Olympics were a religious festival, eventually held over five days, which because it had competition (agôn) at its core was known also as an agôn. A truce came into effect, on either side of the Olympics, lengthened as the Greek world grew larger from the 8th century on. This ‘armistice’ was to enable competitors and spectators to get to and from the Games unharmed.

The site of Olympia in the northwest Peloponnese of southern Greece was chosen chiefly for the availability of a reliable water-supply even at the height of summer. It was not a single space but three spaces: most sacred was the Altis, a grove at the heart of the site within which the athletics events were staged, and where the temples of the chief divinities being worshipped. Besides those two temples (one of which, the Zeus temple, housed a statue destined to be accounted one of the 7 ‘Wonders’ of the ancient world) the single most important religious structure was a huge and ever-growing ash-altar, composed of the remains from sacrificing – ritually slaughtering and then burning – bulls in honour of Zeus.

Outside the Altis but integral to the Games was the Hippodrome, the race-track for equestrian competition. Then there were all those spaces and structures open for religious worship all year round. Competitors were massively outnumbered by the spectators, who were also pilgrims, and of course they needed food and shelter. The noise, the smell, the er mess – it doesn’t bear thinking about too closely, if there really were on the order of 40,000 of them gathered at Olympia every four years, the largest single gathering of Greeks anywhere at any time.

It was a lot like Woodstock 1967. The noise, the smells, the overcrowding – all very reminiscent. The attendees, strictly pilgrims, and those who serviced their various bodily needs over the 5 days of the festival. They came from all over the Greek world of Hellas and may have numbered as many as 40,000.

Theban lyric poet Pindar was commissioned by Olympic victors or their relatives to write celebratory odes (songs in complicated metre). The first in the collection, Olympian 1, starts ‘Best is water…’. Olympian no 7, from 464 BCE (when Pindar was about 60), celebrated the victory in the boxing of Diagoras from the island of Rhodes. Pindar is gracious enough to weave into his song a laudatory role for Charis, the goddess representing grace and graciousness.

They ended round about AD/CE 400 – not for lack of interest, but because they were so essentially pagan. There was absolutely no room for what Christian Orthodox Roman Catholic Emperor Theodosius I ‘the Great’ considered to be the one and only – his – God.

In 1896 because the founding meeting held in Paris to establish the I.O.C. (International Olympic Committee) took place in 1894, and its main decision was to hold the first ‘modern’ Games in Greece – but in Athens, Greece’s capital, and not (for infrastructural reasons) at the original Olympia site. What lay behind the 1894 meeting were essentially two determining factors:

(i) not the only but by far the chief Founding Father, Pierre Baron de Coubertin (1863-1937), was a fierce both Hellenophile – and anglophile, who blamed the defeat of the French at Sédan in 1870 on the absence of proper sports being practiced at French secondary schools;

(ii) in 1875 serious archaeology on the site of ancient Olympia was first undertaken – with the full permission of the Greek government – by the German Archaeological Institute. (Their controlled excavations have continued from then to the present day, interrupted only by two World Wars. German excavators have been responsible for a stunning series of publications as well as for unearthing the vast majority of the objects to be found in Olympia’s two museums, one specifically dedicated to the history of the site and Games, both Ancient and Modern). However, for all that de Coubertin & co. proclaimed they were reviving the ancient Games (competitors, male only, to enter as individuals, no cash prizes only token medals for winners etc), actually they were also very significantly innovating (athletes did not compete stark naked; the marathon race had absolutely no precedents, anywhere).

Pierre Baron de Coubertin had envisioned the Olympic movement as an antidote to exclusionary nationalism: as a way of bringing nations together in amity and harmony. That was not, to put it mildly, how Chancellor Adolf Hitler and the (since 1933) ruling Nazi party envisioned the Berlin Games of 1936. Nazi ideology was racist – and genocidal: anti-Jews, anti-Blacks. Nazi fangirls such as Leni Riefenstahl were hired to immortalize the Berlin Olympics as the ‘Aryan supremacist’ games. Unfortunately for Hitler and von Riefenstahl, US sprinter Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, was black. At least the University of Washington (state) crew that won the 2000-metre rowing race (not an ancient Olympic event) on the Langer See was white… phew. But in every other respect their achievement was quite extraordinary: https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/at-1936-olympic-games-uw-crew-pulled-together-to-make-history/.