Compréhension écrite : From Athens to Paris

A short history of the modern Olympic Games

Every four years, thousands of athletes and billions of television

viewers come together for the Olympic Games. Today they seem like a

permanent part of world culture, but the modern Olympics are not much more

than a century old, and their early years were far from glamorous.

The ancient Olympic Games were held in Olympia, in Greece, for more than

a thousand years, before they came to an end in the fourth century AD. The

idea of bringing them back belonged largely to a French educator, Pierre de

Coubertin. He believed that sport could build character in young people and

encourage understanding between nations. In 1894, at a conference in Paris,

he persuaded delegates from several countries to found the International

Olympic Committee, and it was decided that the first modern Games would take

place in Athens two years later.

The 1896 Games were tiny by today's standards. Around 240 athletes from

fourteen countries took part, and all of them were men. Many competitors

were students or tourists who happened to be in Greece, and there were no

national teams in the modern sense. The most celebrated moment came in the

marathon, a new race inspired by an ancient Greek legend. It was won by

Spyridon Louis, a Greek water carrier, and his victory made him a national

hero.

Four years later, at the Paris Games of 1900, women competed for the

first time, in sports such as tennis and golf. The British tennis player

Charlotte Cooper became the first female individual Olympic champion. Even

so, it took many decades before women were represented equally. Only at the

Paris Games of 2024 did the organisers offer exactly the same number of

places to women and men.

Many of the traditions that we now take for granted developed gradually.

The famous five rings, designed by Coubertin himself, first flew on the

Olympic flag at the Antwerp Games of 1920. Coubertin explained that every

national flag of the time contained at least one of their colours. The first

Winter Games were held in Chamonix, in France, in 1924, and the torch relay,

in which a flame is carried from Olympia to the host city, was introduced in

1936.

The movement also grew. In 1948, the doctor Ludwig Guttmann organised a

sports competition for patients with spinal injuries at a hospital in Stoke

Mandeville, England. His idea developed into the Paralympic Games, which

were first held in Rome in 1960 and have taken place every four years since

then.

The modern Games have faced many difficulties, from huge costs for host

cities to cases of athletes using banned drugs. In 2020, for the first time

in their history, the Games were postponed, when the COVID-19 pandemic

forced Tokyo to delay them by a year. Yet the Olympics have survived.

Perhaps that is because, despite everything, they still offer what Coubertin

hoped for: a few weeks in which the world watches people from almost every

nation compete by the same rules.