PANKRATION: The Ultimate Game

The Greeks invented athletic contests and held them in honour of their gods.

•The Isthmos Games were staged every two years at the Isthmos of Corinth.

•The Pythian Games took place every four years near Delphi.

•The most famous games were those at Olympia, a town in south- western Greece. These took place every four years.

Once in Olympia, the participants were no longer soldiers at all, but athletes.

The word athlete is from ancient Greek and means "one who competes for a prize" and was related to two other Greek words, athlos meaning contest and athlon meaning prize.

Ancient Olympia: reconstruction

The first day of the festival was devoted to sacrifices. On the second day, the foot-races, the main event of the games, took place in the stadium, a rectangular area enclosed by sloping banks of earth.

The Stadium

For seven days before and seven days after the Games (and for the period of the Games, of course), no fighting was allowed. Fighting would have been considered disrespectful to the gods.

The Olympic Truce

Since war was so much a part of life in ancient Greece, victorious soldiers came to be heroes for their city-states and role models for the young.

Not all athletes were soldiers, though.

Holding the Olympic Games and showcasing the athletic talents of men who were not soldiers allowed city-states to celebrate heroes and role models who might not be the best fighters.

The Olympics of ancient Greece weren't exactly the worldwide spectacle that we have today:

-only Greeks took part

-there were only nine events

Stadium entrance

1.) Boxing2.) Discus3.) Equestrian Events4.) Javelin5.) Jumping6.) Pankration7.) Pentathlon8.) Running9.) Wrestling

Athletes didn't wear boxing gloves, but they could hold an opponent with one hand and hit him with another, unlike in boxing. Two versions of the pankration were offered. In the first,whoever hit the ground first lost; in the second, whoever lost consciousness first lost.

Soldiers were usually very good at this sport, and it was not unusual for pankration athletes to be seriously injured or even die.

It took 1503 years for the Olympics to return.

The first modern Olympics were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896. The man responsible for its rebirth was a Frenchman named Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who presented the idea in 1894. Coubertin