From the International Olympic Academy in Olympia, where she has been staying since Sunday night, U.S. shot putter Laura Gerraughty can see the ancient stadium where she will compete and the reassembled vestiges of the sanctuary next to it.
Gerraughty won’t be allowed onto the site until Wednesday morning, when she will be among 39 women breaking an ancient gender barrier as the Games return to Olympia.
“It will be neat to save the first impression for the day of the competition,” Gerraughty said Monday. “That will make it more special to walk in there.”
Even looking at it from a distance, Gerraughty is transfixed by the place where the Olympics began in 776 B.C.
“It seems like something you see in a brochure and don’t think exists until you get there,” she said.
Olympic roots
Wednesday’s shot put events are the first Olympic competition in Olympia since A.D. 393, when Greece was part of a Roman empire whose Christian emperor, Theodosius, abolished the Games as a pagan rite.
Those ancient Olympics were part religious festival, part athletic competition and part “Animal House” for a bunch of guys who often acted like fraternity revelers. Women were not allowed even to watch, let alone compete, on pain of being hurled to a nasty death from a mountaintop if they were caught.
“It is an honor to have a chance no woman ever has had before and probably will never have again,” said Gerraughty, a University of North Carolina senior.
For Gerraughty, 21, who won the U.S. Olympic trials, the chance to compete at Olympia is more significant than the outcome.
“At this point in my career, the opportunity to be part of history is what I’m focusing on,” she said. “I’m not a medal contender so . . . I get to enjoy the Olympics just as an experience.”
All three U.S. men–John Godina, Adam Nelson and Reese Hoffa–are strong contenders for medals. Godina said he was thankful the 43 male athletes, a bulky group, would not revive the ancient tradition of competing in the nude.
“I’m sure most of the fans are very thankful of that too,” he said. “Not a lot of people have a shot putter fetish.”
But the women will be first in the stadium for an event that was not part of the ancient Olympics. The only throwing events, javelin and discus, were part of the ancient pentathlon.
The rest of the 2004 track and field events begin Friday at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, where the shot put medals will be presented.
Giving some athletes, and the world’s TV viewers, a chance to touch the roots of the Olympics as more than tourists had been on the minds of Athens Olympic organizers for several years, but they didn’t make it public until November.
“Even in our bid process, the idea of Olympia was there, but just to dream,” said Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, president of the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee.
At a time when their Olympic preparations still were far behind schedule, the Athens organizers had to persuade the International Olympic Committee they could handle the logistics of moving 800 athletes, officials and media 240 miles from Athens. They also had to overcome expected objections from archeologists worried about damage to the site, which includes ruins of temples next to the ancient stadium.
“We were wondering how they would do it,” Gerraughty said. “It seemed like a logistical nightmare. But everything here is excellent. The rooms are spotless, the throwing rings are good, the people are warm and welcoming. It’s a shot putter’s paradise.”
The shot put was selected for Olympia because it was the only modern Olympic event other than the 100-meter dash that could be held in the confined space of the ancient stadium. It is nothing more than a narrow field, 212 meters long and 28 meters wide, set between two small hillsides where spectators will sit. The 100 meters is too glamorous to move from the main stadium.
More Top Picks Best Pocket Watches For The Money
Shot putters rarely have such focus on their event, and what attention they do get often is negative. All three men’s medalists at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics previously had been punished for doping, and two of the three in 1996 later received lifetime bans after twice testing positive for performance-enhancing steroids.
Perhaps someone should remind the shot putters of the significance of the last ancient artifacts they will see before walking under the remains of the arch that links the stadium with the sanctuary. There are 16 bases for bronze statues of Zeus funded by fines on athletes found to have cheated.
The statues were gone long before the site was excavated in the 19th Century. Virtually nothing visible was left of Olympia when the excavations began in 1829. Its temples, shrines, gymnasiums and hotel fell into disrepair after issuance of the edict to end the Games, and two massive earthquakes accelerated that destruction.
Three millennia after the first Olympics, the natural setting is as striking as the ruins. Sitting at the confluence of two rivers, among olive groves and piney hillsides, it was an obvious choice as a ceremonial site.
Ancient setting
“As you got close, maybe 20 miles away, the scenery changed and got to be what you think about as the look around an ancient Olympic type of scene,” said Godina, a three-time Olympian and two-time medalist, about the bus trip from Athens. “I wish everyone could be here, but we are the lucky few.”
About 15,000 spectators are expected for both the qualifying and the finals, which have separate but free tickets.
“The tickets are free to remind people the spirit of the place is for everybody,” said Sophia Hassapis, assistant manager of the Olympia competition venue.
Although Olympia is a popular tourist destination, it has coped with multitudes only during the biennial ceremonies to light the Olympic flame at the start of the torch relay. The town’s population is 2,500.
“They must be reeling from the impact of the competition and the people coming,” Gerraughty said. “It will be interesting to see how this little town handles it.”
For Godina, who won a silver medal in 1996 and bronze in 2000, the trip has brought to life an Olympics class he took as part of a Greek studies course at UCLA.
“I always liked the part about how [the ancient Games] were absolutely a professional endeavor, and they got to be millionaires if they won,” Godina said. “But there were two sides to that coin. If you lost, your sponsoring village could kill you if they liked.”
Sport was not Olympia’s primary activity. It was built as a place of worship for Olympian Zeus, who undoubtedly would have won a few gold medals in the javelin, given his skill at throwing lightning bolts from his venue on the top of Mt. Olympus.
“When I heard where we were competing, I thought they were talking about Mt. Olympus,” Gerraughty said. “I wondered how it was going to work on a mountain.”
Such confusion is common. The mountain is about 200 miles north of Olympia.
Medal contenders, Godina said, will stop noticing the surroundings once the competition starts. Until then, being in Olympia has made him feel part of a historical continuum.
“You start to realize how long a history sport has and how important it is around the world,” he said. “I don’t know many other aspects of culture that have survived as long as sports.”