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Olympic facts

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Olympic facts

Olympic facts

  • The Olympic torch relay was invented by the Nazis. In the run-up to the infamous Berlin Games of 1936, Hitler's propaganda people wanted to drum up as much hype as possible for the Olympics and Nazi ideology. So they came up with the idea of taking a lit torch through different countries on the way to Berlin – an event that has made headlines ever since.

  • The Olympics are a modern update of the original Games of Ancient Greece, which started in around 776 BC. Nobody knows how they began, though legends speak of Zeus and other gods being involved. Because of this association with Greek deities, the Games were condemned as "pagan" and stamped out by Christian Romans in 393 AD.

  • The first modern Olympic Games took place in Athens in 1896. That's the official story, anyway. In fact, they'd already been revived decades before in the small Shropshire town of Much Wenlock. From 1850 onwards, the town staged "Olympian Games" with events ranging from cricket to, er, knitting. Over 40 years later, a Frenchman named Baron de Coubertin visited Much Wenlock and was inspired to form the International Olympic Committee, which in turn organised the 1896 Games.

  • More countries compete in the Olympic Games than there are in the United Nations. (203 versus 192, if you're counting.)

  • It was only in the second modern Olympics, held in 1900, that women were allowed to compete. The first woman to receive an Olympic gold medal was Charlotte Cooper, a tennis star from Middlesex who would go onto win Wimbledon no fewer than five times.

  • Legendary psychiatrist Carl Jung was indirectly responsible for the famous Olympic Rings. Designing the emblem for a French sporting body, he came up with the idea of interlocking rings. And it was this emblem that inspired Baron de Coubertin to come up with the Olympic Rings in 1913.
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