The modern Games began in 1896 in a marble stadium paid for by one donor, and they have been improvised ever since. These stories run from a world's fair where athletes did not know they were Olympians to a high jump that ended with two champions, by way of a runner who stopped for a rest and came back 54 years later.
Every tile in a Summer Olympics game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Host Cities
nine stories
1The stadium one man paid to rebuild in marble
On the tile: Athens 18961896
The first modern Games needed a stadium, and Greece was short of money. Georgios Averoff, a wealthy Greek living in Egypt, paid to restore the Panathenaic Stadium, originally built in 330 BC, in white marble. The ancient track came with a flaw no donation could fix. It was long and narrow, with turns so sharp that runners had to slow down considerably to stay in their lanes.
Paris stretched its Olympics across five months and folded them into the World Exhibition, where most events were billed as international contests of physical exercise and sport. Hurdles were built from broken telephone poles, hammer throws lodged in trees, and swimmers raced in the Seine, where the current pushed them to improbably fast times. Officials and athletes alike often had no idea they were competing in the Olympic Games.
The 1904 Games were promised to Chicago, then handed to St. Louis so they could share a fair marking the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Europe mostly stayed home. Of roughly 650 competitors, fewer than 100 came from outside the United States, and about half of those were Canadian. Americans took more than three-fourths of the gold medals. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Games, did not come either.
The 1908 Games were awarded to Rome, and the story usually told is that Mount Vesuvius erupted in 1906 and forced Italy to give them up. The eruption was real and so was the cost of rebuilding, but Olympedia notes that Italy had already decided to withdraw because of economic trouble, and that the volcano made a convenient excuse. London took the Games instead and staged them at a new stadium at Shepherd's Bush.
Three years after the war, Britain hosted an Olympics without building a single new venue. London's sports grounds had come through the war in good condition, and Wembley Stadium took the opening ceremony and the track events. There was no Olympic Village: the men slept in military camps, including one at Uxbridge, and the women in college dormitories. Food, clothing and other essentials were still rationed, and the event became known as the Austerity Games.
6One Olympics held in two cities, five months apart
On the tile: Melbourne 19561956
Australia's strict quarantine rules for imported horses ruled out Melbourne for the equestrian events, so they were staged in Stockholm in June, more than five months before everything else opened in November. Because the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, the main Games ran in November and December, and they are still the only Summer Games ever held in those months. Stockholm even lit an Olympic flame of its own for the riders.
Rome did not need to build everything. Alongside its modern arenas, the city restored several ancient sites and pressed them into service. The wrestlers competed in the Basilica of Maxentius. The gymnasts worked in the Baths of Caracalla. The marathon ran along the Appian Way and finished at night beneath the Arch of Constantine, with the old road lit by torches for the runners.
Tokyo held the first Olympic Games in Asia, and gave the final torch to a 19-year-old runner named Yoshinori Sakai. He had been born in Hiroshima Prefecture on August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb fell on the city of Hiroshima. Japan chose him to stand for the country's recovery from the war. Sakai lit the cauldron at the opening ceremony, and the Games themselves reached the United States by satellite.
Montreal's Olympic Stadium earned the nickname the Big Owe. The Games and their buildings left a debt of about 1.5 billion Canadian dollars, much of it serviced for decades by a special tax on tobacco. The board that oversees the stadium confirmed that the last payment went out in mid-November 2006. Quebecers had been paying for those sixteen days of sport for thirty years.
1He won in the open sea, then won for architecture
On the tile: Alfred Hajos1896
There was no Olympic pool in 1896. The swimming races were held in the open sea, in the cold Bay of Zea. Alfred Hajos of Hungary, 18 years old, won two of the four races. He had taken up swimming at 13, after his father drowned in the Danube. Nearly thirty years later, by then an architect, he won a silver medal in the 1924 art competitions for a stadium design, one of only two Olympians with medals in both sport and art.
Jim Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation, won the pentathlon and the decathlon at Stockholm in 1912. Months later a newspaper revealed that he had been paid to play minor league baseball, and his gold medals were taken away. In the early 1980s the IOC gave replica medals to his family but listed him only as a co-champion. Not until July 2022, on the 110th anniversary of his decathlon win, did the IOC name him the sole champion of both events.
Oscar Swahn of Sweden first competed at the Olympics at the age of 60. He won running target gold at London in 1908 and again at Stockholm in 1912, and at Antwerp in 1920 he took a team silver at 72 years and 279 days old. More than a century later, he is still the oldest athlete ever to win an Olympic medal. He won six in all, three of them gold, and shot at every one of his Games alongside his son Alfred.
Eddie Eagan won the light heavyweight boxing gold at Antwerp in 1920 while he was a student at Yale. He went on to law school and then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he became the first American to win the British amateur boxing title. Twelve years after Antwerp he joined a four-man bobsled team at Lake Placid, having taken up the sport about three weeks earlier. They won. He is the only athlete with gold medals in both a summer and a winter sport.
Fanny Blankers-Koen came to London in 1948 as a 30-year-old mother of two, and some experts thought she was too old to be an Olympic sprint champion. She won the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the 80-meter hurdles and the relay, the first woman to take four golds at a single Games. The rules capped her at three individual events, so she skipped the high jump and the long jump, even though she had set world records in both.
At Helsinki in 1952 Emil Zatopek won the 10,000 meters, then the 5,000 meters, then decided at the last minute to enter the marathon. He had never run one in his life. He won that too, in the fastest Olympic marathon run to that point. His stride was famously ungainly and his training was stranger still: intervals of hard sprinting, in any weather, often in heavy work boots rather than running shoes.
The shoes Abebe Bikila bought in Rome gave him blisters, so he ran the 1960 Olympic marathon in bare feet. He won in 2 hours 15 minutes 16.2 seconds, a world best, and became the first Ethiopian and the first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal. Four years later, little more than a month after an operation for appendicitis, he won the marathon again, this time in shoes, the first runner to take two Olympic marathons.
Wilma Rudolph was a sickly child who survived polio and spent years walking with the help of a leg brace and an orthopedic shoe. At 16 she took a relay bronze at Melbourne. At Rome in 1960 she won the 100 meters and the 200 meters, then anchored the winning American relay team, becoming the first American woman to win three track and field gold medals at a single Olympics.
9Eighteen medals, and a record that stood 48 years
On the tile: Latynina1956-1964
The Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina went to three Olympics and came away with eighteen medals, nine of them gold. In 1964 she entered six events and medaled in every one. No Olympian in any sport held more medals than she did from 1964 until 2012, when Michael Phelps passed her in London. Across her three Games she missed the podium in only one Olympic event, the 1956 balance beam, where she tied for fourth.
Many people have heard that each Olympic ring's color stands for a continent, and an official IOC handbook from 1950 said exactly that: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and red for America. The IOC no longer says so. Its own fact sheet explains that the five rings together represent the continents, not their colors. Coubertin chose blue, yellow, black, green and red on white because at least one of those six colors appears on the flag of every nation.
A fire burning over the Games is younger than the modern Olympics themselves. The first one was lit at Amsterdam in 1928, in a bowl on top of the Marathon Tower at the Olympic Stadium, both the work of the Dutch architect Jan Wils. It was lit right there at the stadium, with no ceremony at Olympia and no relay to bring it. Flame and torch relay, inseparable now, began as two separate ideas eight years apart.
An athletes' oath was first spoken at Antwerp in 1920, by a Belgian fencer named Victor Boin, on behalf of every competitor at the Games. The wording has been revised repeatedly since. Swearing became promising, and the honor of each athlete's country became the honor of the team. A clause against doping arrived after the World Anti-Doping Agency was founded in 1999, and in 2021 the oath took on inclusion and equality. Judges got an oath of their own in 1972, coaches in 2012.
The Olympic flag, five rings on a white field, was displayed in Paris in June 1914, when the IOC gathered there for its 20th anniversary. The First World War then canceled the 1916 Games in Berlin. So the flag did not fly over an Olympic Games until 1920, at Antwerp, in war-ravaged Belgium, where the Games were austere and prepared on short notice. Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria were not there to see it. They had been barred as aggressor nations.
5The first true Olympic Village housed only the men
On the tile: The Village1932
Before 1932, Olympic athletes found their own beds in hotels, hostels, schools and barracks, and at Amsterdam in 1928 some teams slept aboard the ships that brought them. Los Angeles built what the IOC calls the first true Olympic Village, in Baldwin Hills: more than 500 bungalows across 321 acres, with a hospital, a library, a post office and forty kitchens serving a variety of cuisines. Only the men stayed there. The women were put up in a downtown hotel, and not until Melbourne in 1956 was an Olympic Village open to both.
From 1912 to 1948 the Olympics awarded gold, silver and bronze for architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. Coubertin himself entered the 1912 literature contest under two invented names, Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach, and won the gold medal for a piece called Ode to Sport. The competitions were dropped because most of the entrants were professional artists, which the IOC of the day would not allow.
The marathon had no fixed length at first, and early Olympic races ran about 25 miles. In 1908 the London course started by the East Terrace of Windsor Castle and finished in front of the royal box in the stadium at Shepherd's Bush, 26 miles 385 yards away. The distance had no particular historical or athletic meaning, but the sport's governing body made it the official length in 1921. Runners have been chasing it ever since.
Between 1900 and 1920, tug of war was part of the Olympic athletics program, contested at every Summer Games of those years. Great Britain won more medals in it than any other nation, and three British pullers, Frederick Humphreys, Edwin Mills and James Shepherd, each finished with three Olympic medals, two of them gold. After 1920 the sport vanished from the program and has never returned.
The 1956 Games in Melbourne were strained by boycotts and by the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Until then, closing ceremonies had been organized nation by nation, around each country's flag. John Ian Wing, a 17-year-old Australian apprentice carpenter, wrote to the organizers suggesting that the athletes come in together instead, without regard to nationality, as one nation. Melbourne tried it, and athletes have mingled at the closing ceremony ever since. One of the Games' warmest traditions began with a teenager's letter.
St. Louis ran its Olympic marathon at three in the afternoon in about 90-degree heat, over dusty roads with a single water stop in nearly 25 miles. Thirty-two men started and fourteen finished. Fred Lorz crossed the line first to cheers, having ridden much of the middle of the race in a car. He was disqualified and banned, the ban was lifted, and he won the Boston Marathon the next year.
Dorando Pietri came into the London stadium ahead of everyone and barely upright. He went down on the track, and doctors and attendants helped him to his feet, again and again, until he crossed the line first. The American team protested that he had been helped, the judges agreed that he could not have finished alone, and the gold went to Johnny Hayes. The next day Queen Alexandra presented Pietri with a gilded silver cup.
Shizo Kanakuri reached the 1912 Stockholm marathon after an 18-day journey from Japan by ship and the Trans-Siberian Railway, ran into fierce heat, and stopped at a house along the course, where the family took him in. Ashamed, he left without telling race officials, and in Sweden he was listed as missing for decades. In 1967 Swedish television invited him back to finish. He crossed the line at 75, in an official time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds.
Amsterdam gave women an 800-meter race in 1928, and Lina Radke won it in 2:16.8, a world record. Newspapers then described runners collapsing at the finish, and officials concluded that the distance was too much for women. A later study of the evidence found that all nine finalists completed the race, and the competitors themselves said in later years that the collapse never happened. Even so, no Olympic race for women ran longer than 200 meters again until 1960.
Shuhei Nishida and Sueo Oe tied for second in the 1936 pole vault, both clearing 4.25 meters, and would not jump off against each other. Japanese officials gave the silver to Nishida, who had cleared the height on his first attempt, and the bronze to Oe. Back home the two had the medals cut apart and joined together again, so that each man owned one that was half silver and half bronze. They are the only Olympic medals of their kind.
Billy Mills, an Oglala Lakota runner raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation and serving as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, went to Tokyo so little known that the favorite, Ron Clarke, said he had never heard of him. On a wet track Mills was pushed into an outer lane on the last lap, then sprinted past Clarke and Mohamed Gammoudi down the final straight to win by three meters in 28:24.4. He is still the only American to have won the Olympic 10,000 meters.
Bob Beamon's jump in the Mexico City final measured 8.90 meters, 55 centimeters past the world record, helped by thin mountain air and a following wind. No one had ever jumped 28 feet; Beamon passed both 28 and 29 in the same leap. When a teammate told him the distance in feet, he sank to the ground. The record stood for 23 years, until Mike Powell broke it in 1991.
The leading high jumpers of the 1960s used the straddle, rolling over the bar belly down, until Dick Fosbury turned his back on it. He ran a curved approach and went over head first and backward, landing on his shoulders on the padded mats that were then replacing sand. Coaches and competitors in Mexico City were skeptical. Fosbury cleared 2.24 meters for an Olympic record and the gold medal. His flop spread quickly, and by the late 1980s other styles had all but vanished.
9He left second place to pull sailors from the sea
On the tile: Lemieux rescue1988
Lawrence Lemieux was running second in a Finn class race off Busan when he saw a capsized 470 and its Singaporean crew in trouble in strong winds, one of them hurt and being swept away from the boat. Lemieux turned out of his race and stayed with the sailors until a patrol boat took them off. He finished eleventh overall at those Games, but officials credited him with the second place he had given up in that race.