The Roots of the Modern Olympic Games

How is it that we have strayed so far from the original Olympics? Starting originally with eight games involving less than 200 participants with one overall winner, has now increased to almost 300 games and thousands of participants with individual game winners. There are two things that come to mind when I think about how much the Olympic Games have changed.

1: I know that as the times change and the technology increases, how is it that we have deviated so much from the original games? History is such an important part for the future, why wouldn’t we want to preserve it in some way?

2: It is better that we have more than one medalist for each of the 300 events instead of one overall winner. I fear that if we had one overall winner, this might cause a war between countries (as if we don’t have enough with the threat of power, weapons, and diversity issues).

I think it would be kind of cool for Egypt to host an old fashioned Olympic meet with the original eight events, a small number of participants, and one overall winner. I think it would help people understand better how the Modern Olympic Games came about. This of course would not be during an Olympic year, nor would it involve any of the normal Olympic athletes. I suppose if an athlete would like to participate, event managers would not be able to deny them participation. Each country would have only one representative. Of course not all of the countries would have to participate either.

This is just me rambling, and perhaps they have already done an event such as this, or maybe it is an idea that is in the works, but I really think it would be interesting to watch an all-around world champion in something other than professional weight lifting…