Few would doubt that the drive to make profits from the modern Olympics has competed with the values de Coubertin identified in the ancient games. This tension is perhaps most clear in the pervasive use of performance-enhancing drugs. While every Olympic competition showcases tremendous individual athleticism, the lucrative endorsement deals now open to the top athletes have motivated many of them to turn to steroids. So endemic has steroid use become, new world records sometimes seem to be more a function of chemical ingenuity than of the human achievement de Coubertin prized.

As for the other Olympic ideals--peace and increased international understanding--there too you have a mixed bag. While the 2006 Turin games brought together India and Pakistan--countries that had threatened war four years earlier--fallout from the terrorism that marred the 1972 Munich games worsened relations between the German and Israeli governments. And while Jesse Owens's stunning performance in Germany in 1936 captivated the Olympic crowds and exposed Hitler's ideas of Aryan superiority as lies, the apparent fixing of a figure skating event at the 2002 Salt Lake City games reinforced a widespread perception that organized crime was rampant in the gold medalists' home of Russia.


Owens won four gold medals for the American team.
Berlin, 1936
© Getty Images, Inc.

But to argue that the modern Olympics have failed to live up to the ideals of the ancient games is to accept that such ideals existed in the ancient games--and that, according to numerous scholars, is not necessarily the case.

What of human achievement? Writing in History Today, Paul Cartledge argues that here de Coubertin grossly misread the spirit of the Greek games. Olympic winners, Cartledge explains, were not viewed as those who had pushed their bodies the hardest in training. Rather, winners were thought to have been "touched by divinity" and "raised above the station of mere mortal." Indeed, legend has it that one Olympic champion--a boxer named Kleomedes, best known for losing his mind and attacking 60 school boys--was actually transformed into a god.

Perhaps the biggest misreading of the ancient games was that they ended all Greek wars. But as Nigel Crowther notes in the Peace Review, "None of the ancient Olympic games ever stopped a war." The cessation of hostilities that tended to coincide with the games was a largely practical method of ensuring competitors arrived in one piece. Indeed, some scholars believe that the truce barely lasted the games, with the closing event--a race in body armor--signaling a return to hostilities. And as for promoting international understanding, forget it: the games were open only to athletes of Greek birth and citizenship.

If some of the Greek games' less noble aspects were better known, the story of the Olympic revival would be messier. And if de Coubertin had focused on them, he may have lost the passion that helped him turn the modern Olympics into one of the most popular sporting events in the world.

Another of the virtues de Coubertin identified in the ancient games and considered crucial for the modern was amateurism. But Paul Cartledge dismisses the Greek athletes as "shamateurs," business-savvy men who competed for olive wreaths at the Olympics while earning a fortune at non-Olympic events.

With reference to specific examples from Cartledge's article and to an article by Hugh Lee, answer the following essential question for critical thinking:

• In what ways was amateurism, long a prerequisite for competing in the modern Olympics, a feature of the ancient games?