The Small English Town That Launched the Modern Olympics

Despite the Greek roots of the word “Olympic,” the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics will bear little resemblance to the sports tournaments in ancient Greece.

The ancient origins of the Olympics can be traced back to a 776 B.C. footrace (known as a hoplitodromos) won by a cook named Koroibos of Elis, according to Jeremy Fuchs, sports journalist and author of the Olympic history book Total Olympics. Participants donned helmets and shields for these kinds of footraces, which were often religious tributes to Zeus. They drew some 40,000 spectators to Olympia where there is a statue of the Greek god. Cow sacrifices were the norm.

But the Olympics we know today actually dates back to an 1890 sports tournament in a small town in England called “Much Wenlock.” The town doctor, William Penny Brookes, was looking for a way to get the town’s 2,500 residents more excited about exercising. Since 1850, he had been hosting an annual tournament that featured sports like soccer, cricket, a blindfolded wheelbarrow race, a pig chase, quoits (throwing rings near or around a peg), and “tilting at the ring,” in which a man on horseback had to unhook a small ring hanging from a crossbar with a lance. Brookes went on to establish the National Olympian Association, which brought together gymnastics, boating, and cricket, and hosted a three-day festival in 1866 in London that drew 10,000 spectators and competitors. Similar events began cropping up across England.

Read More: The Different Prizes Olympic Champs Can Win Depending on Their Country and Sport

The games caught the attention of Pierre de Coubertin, a world renowned champion of sports in schools. He had put an ad in newspapers requesting to learn more about physical-education initiatives, and Brookes responded, inviting him to Much Wenlock. They instantly struck up a friendship and started to envision a new kind of sports tournament in or near various world capitals. As fans of Greek culture, they wanted the tournament to have nods to ancient Greek sporting events. Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894.

And so, the first modern Olympics began in April 1896 in Athens, with 241 athletes from 14 nations competing in 43 events, among them tennis, swimming, and fencing. Spyridon Louis of Greece won the Games’ first-ever marathon. Brookes died four months beforehand in December 1895, but his ideas were incorporated into the tournament. For example, there was an opening ceremony in which the athletes marched around the city as children sang and spectators threw flower petals. Winners received laurel wreaths and medals with Nike, the Greek God of victory, emblazoned on them—just like the Olympic medals handed out in the current era. As Coubertin wrote in an obituary to Brookes, “If the Olympic Games that Modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survives today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr William Penny Brookes.”

The Wenlock Olympian Society still hosts an annual sports tournament in Shropshire, England, and the goal of the Olympics hasn’t changed much since the first modern games in 1896: to encourage people to exercise and challenge themselves. As Fuchs puts it, the Olympics have always been “a competition to bring out the best of people.”