LAST EDITED ON 08-25-04 AT 04:12 PM (EDT)
 
Babylon Project Galactic Database
Text Data Extraction Search: Almanac of Galactic Events
Event Overview: OLYMPIC GAMES
SEARCH COMPLETE: JULY 10, 2408

The Ancient and Early Modern Games

The Olympic Games have their roots in ancient Earth culture. The ancient Greeks, one of Earth's formative cultures, conducted a massed sporting event every four years as part of a festival honoring their gods, starting around SY -776 and ceasing in SY 394. The ancient Games were simple affairs - the first few consisted of but a single foot race - but their fame was worldwide and endured into the planet's industrial era.

In SY 1894, more than a century before Earth's First Contact with Salusia, a French nobleman founded a society intended to revive the Games in what was then a modern context. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, an avid believer in the power of sport to draw people together, saw his revived Olympics as not only a giant track meet, but also a celebration of humanity. Athletes from all nations and creeds, he said, would be welcome to test their strength, speed, and skill in an atmosphere of friendly competition.

The first "modern" Olympic Games were held in 1896 in the city of Paris. Thereafter, they were conducted every four years, each time in a different city - a departure from the custom of the original Olympics, which were always held at Olympia. In 1924, a second event encompassing winter sports was added. Later, the Winter Games were shifted to an offset schedule so that they were not held in the same year as the Summer Games. This change was made by holding Winter Games in 1992 and 1994, then returning to the four-year cycle thereafter.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the Games grew in scope and pomp, became world events of great significance and interest, watched by billions in person and on television. Great Olympians became household names, just as they had in ancient Greece - known even to people without any other interest in sports. 10,318 athletes competed in 271 events at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, the last summer Olympics to be held before First Contact in 1999.

First Contact, and the resultant explosion of Earth's people and culture onto the galactic scene, left the future - indeed, the relevance - of the Olympics in doubt. For most of the twenty-first century, they continued as an event held only on and including only athletes from Earth, which, as the planet's culture adjusted to the concept of a galactic scale for things, rather relegated them to the status of a county fair.

In the twenty-second century, as Earth's first wave of colonies matured into world-nations in their own right, the Games were expanded to include them. The first off-Earth Olympic Games were the Winter Games of 2118, which were held in Port Arthur, capital city of Ice Planet Halloran V. The summer Olympics followed, going to Berlin, Niogi, in 2124.

To keep the competition fair, only humans descended from Earth's biological line were permitted to compete at this point in history. Now, as the Games expanded beyond Earth and started attracting offworld attention again, public sentiment began to question this policy.

Change came gradually. In 2166, members of the non-Earth species classified as human by galactic medical authorities (Zardons, Corellians, and so on) were permitted to compete. Representatives of athletic federations on other worlds whose inhabitants were athletically comparable to humans began lobbying for inclusion as well, and some were admitted in a piecemeal fashion over the next century and a half.

The galactic turmoil that marked the end of the twenty-third and beginning of the twenty-fourth century called the future of the Games into question again. The International Olympic Committee, which had governed Olympic activities since its foundation by Coubertin in 1894, was dissolved during Earth's civil war in the 2320s, preceding the United Galactica's collapse in the 2330s.

The Second Olympic Revival

With the foundation of the United Federation of Planets and its dedication to the ideals of sentient cooperation and friendship, though, Baron de Coubertin's Olympic movement found new support from an unlikely source. The great Salusian statesman Baron Vlatimyr Arconian, uncle to Queen Asrial I, challenged the first Federation Assembly in 2339 to revive the International Olympic Committee and the Olympic Games themselves, not as an Earth-centered or human-centered event, but as a celebration for all of galactic sentience.

Georges Bacquarac, the last Chairman of the IOC before its dissolution in 2323, objected that the inevitable physical differences between the races would make fair competition between, say, humans and Salusians impossible - making a mockery of the Games. This was the standard objection that had been used by the IOC since the first calls for non-human involvement in the Games.

Bacquarac also said that Coubertin's vision did not encompass Earth as part of a galactic civilization, but dealt only with the planet and its people. To support his argument, he quoted from the great man's writings, saying, "'The strength of Olympism comes to it from that which is simply human, hence worldwide is its essence.'" (Emphasis Bacquarac's.) He also stressed the mention of humanity in another of Coubertin's famous statements, "May the Olympic Torch pursue its way through ages, increasing friendly understanding among nations, for the good of a humanity always more enthusiastic, more courageous and more pure."

Arconian acknowledged that Coubertin had never envisioned Earth as part of a galactic culture - very few people had in 1894 - but argued that, had he lived to see the modern universe, he would surely have objected to the exclusionist policy that ruled the Games from 2000 to 2322. Then he stunned his opponent, who was clearly not expecting an alien diplomat to have read Coubertin, by quoting the Frenchman himself in support of his point - insisting that Coubertin's writings revealed an inclusionist character that would joyfully have embraced a pan-galactic society.

Among the Coubertin quotations used by Arconian in his speech were:

"Racial distinctions should not play a role in sport."

"All sports for all people."

"The Olympic Games are for the world and all nations must be admitted to them."

"The Olympic Spirit is neither the property of one race nor of one age."

The last, Arconian concluded, clearly showed that Coubertin was sensitive to the flow of history and would have wanted his Games to adapt with the times. Had they not already? The 1896 Games hadn't even included women, let alone non-humans, and for reasons similar to those Bacquarac had cited - the inevitable athletic differences between them, differences in muscle mass, lung capacity, and other factors that would make direct strength-and-speed competition between men and women unfair.

"The answer was obvious then and it's obvious now," Arconian said. "You have separate hundred-meter dashes and so forth for human men and human women - simply expand the program. All sports for all people, M. Bacquarac."

Bacquarac protested that such a move would render the Games so impossibly complicated that no organization could ever stage them, let alone observers keep track of them - at which point Arconian, the master negotiator, conceded that this might be so, and made a simple proposal: Let's try it once and see how it goes.

The new, truly international International Olympic Committee had almost a full decade to work out the program for the expanded, all-species Olympic Games. The Games of the CXIV Olympiad were held in July of 2348 in Saenar, the ancestral capital of Salusia - the first time the Olympics were held on a world with a smaller human than non-human population. Nearly sixty thousand athletes competed in more than a thousand events. The Games lasted for a full month, were attended by millions of spectators and watched by a number almost beyond imagining on television. The occasion was the biggest, most complex undertaking ever attempted for non-military purposes... and it was a complete and total success. Thus convinced, Bacquarac became one of the greatest supporters of Olympic universalism, as Arconian's view became known.

The Modern Olympic Games

Today's Olympics are open to all athletes who are physically capable of competing in the events. Traditional and modern sports from a hundred major sporting cultures are represented in the event program, with more under consideration every year. Participant species are broken up into performance classes, such that everyone competing in a particular event theoretically stands a chance of winning. Athletes grouped in one class may attempt to compete in a higher class if they so choose, a policy which has led to a few spectacular upsets since its introduction at the 2352 Mega Tokyo Games.

Some events function differently than others. For example, the shooting sports, which depend on dexterity and visual acuity rather than strength and speed, have different performance guidelines than those of the more vigorous sports like track-and-field. Fencing's guidelines almost completely ignore strength, since it has very little role in defining performance in the sport. In all cases, the formulae that govern the classifications are carefully constructed using the latest scientific data and are constantly under review for fairness.

Arconian and Bacquarac's Games have also revived a feature of the ancient games much admired by historians: The Olympic Truce, under which nations that may be hostile to each other lay aside their differences for the period of the Games, granting athletes and spectators safe passage to and from the event and agreeing that their national problems will not affect their athletes' conduct on the field of play. Later, the Truce was codified into the Babylon Foundation's charter as a prime example of existing international cooperation.

The IOC can fine participating nations heavily or expel them from the Games for violating the Truce. The Olympic Truce's greatest test came at the 2392 Qo'noS Games, during which nearly a third of the participating nations were technically at war with the Klingon Empire. Only three nations were fined for Truce violations and only one, the Cardassian Union, expelled. Cardassia was not permitted to send a team to the Olympics again until 2404.

The Winter Games, revived under the same rules and policies, thrive as well. Though still smaller than the Summer Games by about the same proportion as always, they have grown apace with their summer counterparts and are an arresting spectacle in their own right. Fully 30% of sentients polled after the 2402 Winter Games in Novosibirsk, Earth, said they preferred to watch the winter version of the event.

Summer or winter, Avalon Broadcasting System anchor Jim McKay summed up the feeling of the modern Games best in his opening statements for ABS's coverage of the 2404 Coronet Games:

"Thousands of athletes and millions of supporters are gathering in Corellia's capital this week, gathering to pay homage to Baron de Coubertin's vision. The spectacle they've come to witness combines that most primal of animal instincts, the drive to compete, and that most civilized of sentient behaviors, sportsmanship, across hundreds of species and thousands of sports.

"There are other sporting events, of course - millions of them. Most of them pay more, but when this time comes, that doesn't matter. What all these people are here for now is more than just a sporting event. For an athlete, there simply isn't a bigger stage than this, anywhere in the universe. Milestones will be achieved. Records will be broken. Dreams will be realized... and others lost forever. Lives will be changed in a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth of a second - at the Games of the CXXVIII Olympiad!"

End of Text Data Extract
thank you for using the
Babylon Project Galactic Database