Series ・ 8 parts

The Origins of Sport: Why Do Humans Compete?

The Olympics were never, in the beginning, a sporting event. The ancient Olympic Games, which began in 776 BCE, were a religious festival dedicated to Zeus, the supreme god, at which a hundred oxen were sacrificed. To run, to throw, was to pray. This is a journey back through the sacred precinct of ancient Greece, in search of the memory of the 'sacred body' that modern sport has forgotten.

Start from Part 1 →

01 Bodies Offered to the Gods — Olympia, the Sacred Arena The Olympics were never, in the beginning, a sporting event. The ancient Olympic Games, which began in 776 BCE, were a religious festival dedicated to Zeus, the supreme god, at which a hundred oxen were sacrificed. To run, to throw, was to pray. This is a journey back through the sacred precinct of ancient Greece, in search of the memory of the 'sacred body' that modern sport has forgotten.
02 The Winner Who Was Sacrificed — Mesoamerica and the Ballgame of Life and Death From before 1650 BCE, the peoples of the New World were already striking a hard rubber ball with their hips. Passed down through the Olmec, the Maya, and the Aztec, this game was a rite that upheld the order of the cosmos — and a stage of death, where the losers and captives were beheaded. We dig into another origin of sport, one in which competition and human sacrifice were inseparable.
03 Tame the Savage Game — The Nineteenth Century, When Rules Were Born For more than nine hundred years, English villages played rough ball games that spilled blood, and kings banned them more than thirty times. It was the public schools of the nineteenth century that tamed this savage game with 'rules' and remade it into an education for building character. Why was modern sport born in the Britain of the Industrial Revolution? A story of codification.
04 The Ghost of Antiquity, Revived — Coubertin and the Modern Olympics For fifteen hundred years the Olympic Games had lain silent. They were brought back to life by the obsession of a single French aristocrat. Pierre de Coubertin borrowed the authority of ancient Greece and raised aloft an ideal — world peace through sport. The first Games opened in Athens in 1896, on the country's independence day. Yet from the moment it was born, the festival could never be separated from politics.
05 War, Sublimated — How Nation and Capital Swallowed Sport Modern sport began as an amateur ideal, then turned professional across the twentieth century, bound itself to television, and swelled into an enormous business. The Games that saved a bankrupt Olympics — and changed it forever — were the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. From gambling to broadcasting rights, this is the history of the money that has always moved sport.
06 Who Has the Right to Compete? — The Boundaries Drawn Around the Body The ancient Games belonged to free-born men alone. The modern Games, too, shut women out of their first edition. Who may take part in sport, and which bodies are deemed 'correct'? That line has been contested in the name of science, in the form of sex verification testing and doping controls. The final chapter of the series asks what sport has reflected about humanity itself.
07 And So, Back to Play — The Festival of Homo Ludens Gods, rules, nations, capital, science. The journey tracing the subject of sport arrives at last at the simplest answer of all. Play. In 1938, the historian Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens that play precedes culture itself. The magic circle, and Caillois's four kinds of play. A finale that reties all six previous episodes from the viewpoint of the player.
08 The Historian Who Discovered Play — Reading Huizinga's Homo Ludens — Research Note 'Sport begins in play' is not a poetic flourish — it is a scholarly proposition. In 1938 the historian Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens that play precedes culture, and that contest (agôn) is what generates culture itself. Yet in the same book he condemned modern sport as an example of play that had died. To close the series, we read this single volume as researchers do.