‘Ancient’ Olympics revival shuns commerce

[StephenMasten]

August 10, 2012 2:04 pm

'Ancient' Olympics revival shuns commerce 
By Kerin Hope in Athens

   In the cool of a 37m-long tunnel, its stone blocks decorated with homoerotic graffiti from the 4th century BC, athletes await the command to enter the stadium.

Preparing to run like the ancients, they curl their naked toes around two parallel grooves in the long, stone starting block and lean forward with both arms extended. At the shout of "Apite!" (Go!), they lunge forward and sprint feverishly across a surface of baked mud.

Professional athletes, branded sports gear, mobile phones and advertising logos are banned from this pine-clad sanctuary in the northern Peloponnese, the site of a 2,300-year-old athletics stadium which every four years hosts an authentic ancient games. The "athletes" – anyone aged over eight can compete – run a single event, a truncated version of the most important race at any ancient games: the "stade" of just under 200m. In ancient Greece its winner would acquire lasting fame by giving his name to the entire games of that year.

They run in groups of 12, grouped by age and gender. Winners are crowned at the end of the day with a pungent garland of wild celery.

Once sacred, like ancient Olympia, to the god Zeus, Nemea was on a circuit of four sanctuaries known in antiquity for holding prestigious games. The modern village in the next valley is better known for its vineyards that produce high-quality red wine for export.

Critics call the Nemean games kitschy, decrying the runners' baggy white "chitons" – a nod to official Greek prudishness that rules out the athletic nudity preferred by the ancients – and the modern ritual of lighting a flame in a concave mirror to burn in the stadium during the games.
But for Stephen Miller, a retired classics professor from California, the event held in the stadium he excavated in the 1970s aims to be everything a modern Olympics is not.

"We try to keep it as authentic as we can, within reason," Prof Miller says.

"These games are about celebrating participation, and barefoot running is one sport that almost everyone can tackle. We get a fair number of contestants in their 80s and 90s. And there is no timekeeping."

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the father of today's Olympic Games, would surely applaud Nemea's back-to-basics approach – apart perhaps from one decision. The Olympic motto "faster, higher, stronger" was rejected out of hand when Prof Miller and a group of village residents chose in 1996 to make the revived games as inclusive as possible.

Nemea's organisers have relied on a lean website and 300 local volunteers to spread the word. About 30 Greek and foreign sponsors contributed to this year's €40,000 budget for the games in June, along with a small grant from an EU regional programme. This year saw 1,020 participants from 106 countries.

"We had about one-third more runners than four years ago, in spite of – or maybe because of – the economic crisis," says George Kostouros, a local author and historian who has worked with Prof Miller to revive the Nemea games.

Says Evangelos Andrianakos, Nemea's mayor: "If this year was anything to go by, the sixth Nemead in 2016 could be a much bigger scale event."

His ambition is to get enough EU funding to build a hotel close to the sanctuary so that visitors can stay the night.

"It would be the first proper accommodation here since the hostels that were built for the ancient athletes."