When the Summer Olympics were held in Tokyo last year — officially the 2020 Olympics postponed a year due to COVID — there were 11,420 athletes from 206 countries competing in 339 events in 33 sports.
It bore little resemblance to the first Modern Olympics, 1896 in Athens. That competition had 241 athletes from 14 nations, all but the United States from Europe, competing in 43 events in nine sports.
Pierre de Coubertin, an aristocratic French educator and historian, can be considered the father of the Modern Olympics. It was his idea, accepted by an 1894 meeting in Paris attended by sports societies from 11 countries.
Greece had been the site of the Ancient Olympics, so Athens was chosen for the first Modern Olympics.
De Coubertin asked Dr. William Milligan Sloan, a history professor at Princeton and founder and first chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, to organize the U.S. team. There were no trials; he recruited athletes from the Northeast.
The U.S. had 14 competitors, mostly Princeton and Harvard students and members of the Boston Athletic Association who trained at the Pennington School in New Jersey. They competed in three sports, track, swimming and shooting.
Were they the best the country could have had? Of course not, but they did very well once they reached Athens, which was an adventure itself. They traveled by boat and train, arriving the day before the games began after a 17-day journey.
The U.S. led in gold medals with 11, one more than Greece, which had two-thirds of the athletes. American athletes won nine of the 12 track events and added two golds in shooting.
Actually they did not receive gold medals. Winners were given silver medals and runnerups copper medals. Retroactively, gold, silver and bronze medals were awarded for first, second and third.
The star of the U.S. team was Thomas Burke, a student at the Boston University School of Law, who won the 100 meter and 400 meter. His times, 12.0 in the 100 and 54.2 in the 400, would not win most high school meets today.
Summer Olympics have been held every four years since except 1916 due to World War I, 1940 and ’44 due to World War II and the delayed 2020 Olympics. Looking ahead, the 2024 Olympics have been awarded to Paris for the third time, 2028 to Los Angeles for the third time and 2032 to Brisbane, the third time in Australia after Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000. Two other U.S. cities have hosted, St. Louis in 1904 and Atlanta in 1996.
The 1896 Olympics followed the Ancient Olympics in being men only. Women began competing at the second Olympics, Paris in 1900.
Winter Olympics began in 1924. They were held the same year as the Summer Olympics through 1992, then moved to the two-year period between the summer games beginning in 1994.
