The Ancient
Olympics
by CTCWeb Editors
The Events (con't)
Wrestling
|
Origin |
The first recorded Olympic wrestling
match occurred at the Olympic games in 708 BCE. Wrestling was
highly valued as a form of military exercise without weapons. |
|
Equipment |
Wrestler covered themselves in
olive oil and dust to make themselves easier to grasp. The event
took place in a keroma, a muddy arena. |
|
Rules |
Punches, biting, tripping, and
eye gouging were not permitted. No weight classes existed but
boys did not wrestle men. There were two forms of wrestling at
the games, orthia pale, upright wrestling, and kato
pale, ground wrestling, which had different holds and different
ways to determine the winner. In orthia pale, opponents
tried to throw the other to the ground three times during a match,
and a match did not end until this happened. The victor was known
as the triakter. In kato pales, opponents fought
until one acknowledged defeat by holding up his right hand with
his index finger extended. |
|
Images |
Click here to see an image of men wrestling. |
|
Text |
See Pausanias, Description
of Greece, 5.8.4. |
|
Ancient Athlete |
Milon of Croton won his
first Olympic victory in boy's wrestling. During his career he
won six wrestling championships at both the Olympic and Pythian
games. In total, Milon won 32 wrestling championships. Strong
enough to carry an ox on his shoulders as a young man, the older
Milon died a horrible death when he attempted to rip a split
tree apart and one of his hands became stuck. Unable to free
himself, wild animals attacked and killed the captive Milon during
the night. |
Jumping
|
Origin |
Directly related to skills that
a soldier must possess in war, jumping was not a separate Olympic
event as it is today. Instead, it was only part of the pentathlon. |
|
Equipment |
Unlike in the modern Olympics,
jumpers used halteres, lead or stone weights used for
jumping events. To increase jumping distance, the athlete held
one of these telephone receiver or dumbbell shaped weights in
each hand, ran and jumped, swinging the weights, and released
the halteres behind him at the end of his jump. Halteres
weighed between 1.6 to 4.6 kilograms, or 3.5 to 10.1 pounds.
Pausanias describes the halteres as "half of a circle,
not an exact circle but elliptical, and made so that the fingers
pass through as they do through the handle of a shield,"
Description of Greece, 5.26.3. |
|
Rules |
Athletes jumped into a pit approximately
50 feet long and landed with their feet together. Officials measured
a jump from the bater, a fixed point on the side of the
jumping pit and used a kanon, a wooden rod, to measure
the distance of each athlete's jumps. |
|
Images |
Click here to see a list of images of athletes
jumping. |
|
Modern Athlete |
 At the first modern Olympic games in Athens,
a student from Harvard, Ellery H. Clark, won the long jump and
the high jump, the only person to ever accomplish this feat.
Fouling on his first two attempts at the long jump, Clark managed
to win the gold on his third and final attempt. |
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