The very first modern Olympics as they were covered in 1896
With the excuse of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games 2012 today. Greek Voice UK takes the liberty of publishing a series of reports from the first modern Olympics in Athens as they were covered by the British press in 1896.
The Olympics was a brand new spectacle for the world then. Inspired by French historian Pierre de Coubertin
6 April 1896
“The Globe and Traveller” reports
“We may wish promoters of the new Olympic Games all possible success without, perhaps, expecting that they will succeed in rivaling the contests that filled Elis with eager athletes in days gone by, and inspired the “Theban Eagle” with immortal verse. The new games are but a feeble copy of the old. They are neither celebrated at the historic spot nor are those precautions taken that the competitors should be men of unmixed Hellenic blood, which are regarded as almost the most important of the arrangements at Olympia.
Indeed, we fear that, were an ancient winner of the olive crown to revisit the glimpses of the moon, he would disdain to enter the lists with what he could only regard as a horde of unseemly barbarians. The modern world will look at these things from a different standpoint, and its criticism, if it be just, will be directed against the absence from these oecumenical rather than Hellenic sports of just that very tribe of barbarians whose very existence seemed a myth to the Greek. The almost entire absence of English competition from the new games is a thing to be deplored in the interests of the games themselves, and that Oxford and Cambridge should be unpresented officially robs them of much of their interest in the eyes of that portion of the world which, in athletics at any rate, attains most nearly to the Hellenic idea. It can hardly be said that this is the fault of the English themselves. While the promoters took infinite trouble to make the revival known in almost every village in France, they seem to have paid little or no attention to this country. It may be that the Athenian sports would not much attract our athletes, but at any rate an attempt might have been made to induce them to come. If the revival is a success it cannot but have an important influence upon the modern Greeks, and we hope that, on another occasion, the promoters will see the desirability of appealing more definitely for that Anglo-Saxon support which has never been withheld from the little kingdom round which the most glorious memories of the world are clustered”
Greek Voice UK 