Naked Truths About the Olympics

The first Olympiad was held in Ancient Greece in 776 BC. The fair sex, alas, would have to wait another 2,676 years before competing in the event. That it happened at all 124 years ago was a real achievement, given decades of “open opposition” from the modern Olympic Movement’s first president, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

In the 1900 Games, also held in Paris, 22 determined women took part in five sports: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf, a mere two per cent of the 997 athletes. Only golf and tennis had women-only events. Gender equality, however, had to wait over another century. At the 2020 Tokyo Games the number of women competitors was 5,457, 48 per cent of 11,420 athletes, about the same as Paris 2024.

Female participation in the ancient Olympiads was controversial too. Only men and boys who spoke Greek as their first language were allowed initially to compete in them. Barbarians could attend as spectators, but slaves were excluded. No married women were permitted, or even allowed to cross the nearby Alpheios River during a Game, “under penalty of being hurled from the Typaeon Rock.” (Stuart Rossitor, Greece – The Blue Guide, 1977, page 331).

In Plato’s dialogue, The Republic, written in 375BC, there is an intriguing chapter on the “status of women” in society. Socrates, Plato’s fictional narrator, discusses the subject with Glaucon, one of the author’s elder brothers. His argument is a rational one. He asks whether sex difference is a proper basis for determining a person’s occupation or social function. His conclusion: it is not.

For Socrates, the only difference between the sexes was physical function, as in procreation. Apart from that, he reasoned that men and women can and should pursue the same range of occupations and be able to perform the same functions. They should receive the same education too, as it would ensure the state got the best value from both sexes.

Socrates: So if we are going to use men and women for the same purposes, we must teach them the same things. We educated the men both physically and mentally. We shall have to train the women also, then, in both kinds of skill, and train them for war as well, and treat them in the same way as the men.

Glaucon: It seems to follow from what you said.

Socrates: I dare say that their novelty would make many of our proposals seem ridiculous if they were put into practice.

Glaucon: There’s no doubt about that.

Socrates: And won’t the most ridiculous thing of all be to see the women taking exercise naked with the men in the gymnasium? It won’t only be the young women; there will be elderly women too, just as there are old men who go on with their exercises when they are wrinkled and ugly to look at.

Glaucon: Lord! That’s going to be a funny sight by present standards.

Sir Desmond Lee, the translator of my edition, has a footnote here: “the Greeks always exercised naked, and the nakedness is merely a consequence of the proposal that women should take part in athletics at all. Women took part in physical training at Sparta. (1974, Penguin Classics, page 229)

Socrates: Still, now we’ve launched out on the subject we must not be afraid of the clever jokes that are bound to be made about all the changes that follow in the physical training and education of women, and above all about them being trained to carry arms and ride.

Glaucon: You are quite right.

Socrates: We will ask the critics to drop their usual practice and to be serious for once, and remind them that it was not so long ago that the Greeks thought – as most of the barbarians still think – that it was shocking and ridiculous for men to be seen naked. When the Cretans, and later the Spartans, first began to take exercise naked, wasn’t there plenty of material for the wit of the comedian of the day?

Glaucon: There was indeed.

Socrates: But when experience showed them that it was better to strip than wrap themselves up, what reason had proved best lost its absurdity to the eye. Which shows how idle it is to think anything ridiculous except what is wrong.

Glaucon: That is certainly true.

Socrates: The first thing we have to agree on, then, is whether these proposals are feasible or not. For, whether it’s asked as a joke or in earnest, we must allow people to ask the question. Is the female of the human species naturally capable of taking part in all the occupations of the male, or in none, or in some only? And if some, is military service one of them? That’s the best way to begin, and the way in which we are likely to reach a fair conclusion.

Glaucon: Yes, I agree.

Their discussion continued and reached this “fair conclusion”: in an ideal state the best women should join the ruling class and become Guardians. There was, however, one unusual condition: they would have to discard their modesty and agree to strip for exercise.

There was, however, one unusual condition: they would have to discard their modesty and agree to strip for exercise.

Socrates: So the arrangements we proposed are not only possible but also the best for our state.

Glaucon: Yes.         

Socrates: Our women Guardians must strip for exercise, then – their excellence will be all the clothes they need. They must play their part in war and all other duties of a Guardian, which will be their sole occupation; only, as they are the weaker sex, we must give them a lighter share of these duties than men. And any man who laughs at women who, for these excellent reasons, exercise themselves naked is, as Pindar says, “picking the unripe fruit of laughter” – he does not know what he is laughing at or what he is doing. For it is and will always be the best of sayings that what benefits us is fair, what harms us shameful.

Glaucon: I agree entirely.

Plato’s ideas, the translator comments, “would have seemed revolutionary to the ordinary Greek”, despite the status of women being discussed widely before he wrote The Republic. Similar notions were not only “in the air”, but they had been parodied mercilessly by Aristophanes, the leading comic dramatist of the day.

While “most modern opinion would agree with Plato”, Sir Desmond was cautious for this reason: “One may doubt the desirability or possibility of the exact similarity of role which Plato demanded. To sweep aside the physiological differences as unimportant, and ignore the psychological differences they entail, is to be in danger of ignoring women’s special excellences.” In other words, presumably, vive la différence.

As for the ancient Olympian Games, we have a wealth of evidence from Olympia itself. The site has been excavated extensively, mainly by German and French archaeologists in the nineteenth century.

Olympia was not a city, but a sacred precinct occupied exclusively by temples, dwellings for priests and officials, and public buildings. An enclosure known as the Altis was dedicated to Zeus, in whose honour was held the quadrennial festival and the games. A striking feature of the festival was the proclamation of the Ekechteiria, or Olympic Truce. Still more surprising was its almost universal observance — Stuart Rossitor, Greece – The Blue Guide, 1977, page 331

An Olympic victory was considered the highest possible honour. No gold, silver and bronze medals in those days. A chaplet or crown of wild olive immortalized the victor, his family and place of residence.

The Greeks used the Olympiads, or periods of four years between the Games, as the basis of their chronology. They were held regularly in peace and war for over a millennium, from 776 BC until their suppression in AD 393, when an edict by Christian emperor, Theodosius I, prohibited all pagan festivals.  Theodosius II ordered the destruction of Olympia in AD 426. The ruins were quarried and used to build a Christian church and some fortification against the Vandals.  But that’s another story.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1862-1937) did what he thought was right at the time. He wanted everyone to engage in sport: “the birthright of all, equally and to the same degree, and nothing can replace it” (Coubertin 1932, 213). Yet he openly opposed female participation in Olympic track and field events all his life. While it grew six-fold during his IOC presidency, an Olympic Movement factsheet indicates it was still only 4.4 per cent in 1925 and 8.3 per cent at the 1936 Berlin Games.

When Alice Milliat launched the Women’s Olympic Games in Paris in the early 1920s, Coubertin stood in opposition. A decade earlier he had written that adding “a little female Olympiad” (Coubertin 1912 [2000], 713) to the Games would be too much work for the organisers, and that a feminine Olympiad would be “impractical, uninteresting, ungainly and […] improper” (Coubertin 1912 [2000], 713). Those words earned him the ire of feminist historians and the occasional accusation of misogyny. (Natalia Camps, Y Wilant, & George Hirthler; IOC document)

Unlike Socrates, Coubertin was a chivalrous defender of female modesty, a bulwark against changing values, risqué dress and increasing public exposure of the body.

How does one explain this paradox? Unlike Socrates, Coubertin was a chivalrous defender of female modesty, a bulwark against changing values, risqué dress and increasing public exposure of the body. Protecting what for him was “the dignity of women” was a high priority. The highest calling of a woman was to be “the companion of man, the future mother of a family” (Coubertin, 1901, 281).

If some women want to play football or box, let them, provided that the event takes place without spectators, because the spectators who flock to such competitions are not there to watch a sport. — Coubertin, 1928, page 189

An Olympiad without spectators? He wanted, in other words, to protect women from those whose motives were more lecherous than athletic. Despite his opposition, he admitted at one point that “ultimately the public will decide” (Coubertin 1931, 6). And decide it has: the naked truth today, dear reader, is surely we are all voyeurs now.

After Coubertin stood down from the IOC Presidency in 1925, he continued to advocate “Olympism”. It was “not a system,” he said, “but a state of mind. It can permeate a wide variety of modes of expression. No single race or era can claim to have the monopoly on it.” His idea of an Olympic institute eventually found expression in the construction of an International Olympic Academy near the original site in 1961.

Sport, of course, has replaced Zeus as the secular religion of our age. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the sacred flame once dedicated to a Greek god somehow has become today’s “Olympic spirit”.

Coubertin died in 1937, after collapsing during a walk in Geneva. A few months later, IOC officials travelled to Olympia and interred his heart in the memorial stele. It was moved later to a new location, Coubertin Grove.

It will rest here for eternity near the spot where those who were the founders of the Games of Greece in the epoch of her splendour sleep their last sleep, and not far from the site where is lit the torch that goes to bear the sacred fire to the stadia. — Count Henri Baillet Latour, IOC President, 1937

Home is where the heart is.