Vans dropped off the shot putters in front of the last remaining arch of a tunnel that led from the religious sanctuary to the stadium more than 2,000 years ago.
As they walked under the arch, the athletes saw hillsides lined with thousands of spectators, as they would have been 2,000 years ago. Ahead lay the dirt field, the stadium of ancient Olympia, that had been turned into a throwing arena for one day in 2004.
Adam Nelson of Atlanta walked under the arch three times Wednesday–once in the morning, once in the late afternoon, once in the early evening. The third time, he was accompanied by women in white robes who placed olive wreaths on the heads of the top eight finishers in the men’s and women’s Olympic shot put.
“Talk about Olympic spirit–it triggers it just like that,” Nelson said of his first trip under the arch. “It certainly brings out certain emotions in me as an Olympic athlete.”
As he left the arena after the ceremony, Nelson stopped to look at a mark in the sun-baked dirt, the mark that might have made him Olympic champion. His emotions then had nothing had to do with ancient Olympic history but instead were raw and immediate and personal.
“Can I get to my wife, please?” Nelson asked the media waiting to talk with him. “I’ll be right back.”
Nelson hugged Laci, his wife of six months, and both began to cry. He had won a second straight Olympic silver medal, but this didn’t feel as good as the first.
“I didn’t throw well at ancient Olympia,” he said.
And isn’t that what this was supposed to be about, this return to the roots of the Olympic Games? It was coming back to a place where victory was so prized only one wreath was awarded, to the winner, to a stadium built not as a symbol but as a venue for fierce, intense competition.
“I feel so small competing in this ancient place,” said Kalliopi Ouzouni, one of Greece’s two woman throwers, neither a finalist.
The symbolism that has developed with the passing of time left a special patina on the medals that will be presented Friday at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, but the alchemy of Olympia would not change Nelson’s medal from silver to gold.
“The only person to blame is myself,” Nelson said. “I just went out and lost this competition.”
Nelson’s first of six throws in the final, 69 feet 5 1/4 inches, would not be bettered by anyone else. Yuri Bilonog of Ukraine equaled it on his final throw, which meant the winner would be decided by second-best mark.
As he readied for his final throw, Nelson knew he had to top 69-5 1/4 because he had fouled on his other four attempts, dropping the 16-pound ball on one, falling on another. His last throw looked like a winner, but it also was a foul, so no measurement was given.
But Nelson went for a look at where it landed, wondering about what might have been, deciding right then to keep going for another four years. What are four years when you are standing in a place where the first Olympics were contested 2,780 years ago?
Historians mark the first Olympic Games at 776 B.C. On Wednesday, past met present before the eyes of a global TV audience.
There was stifling heat and wind and blowing dust and, if you were among the 15,000 sitting on the hillsides in the afternoon, ants crawling up your legs. It was just the way ancient historians described the atmosphere at the Olympics, where the spectacle was presumed to outweigh the discomfort.
“I felt a powerful emotion at the entrance of the athletes,” said Arethusa Makri, who came from Athens, 240 miles away. “In my mind, I was seeing the ancient athletes combined with the contemporary scene.”
That scene included a constant movement of spectators on the road above the stadium. They came, they saw, they wilted.
More Top Picks Best Blood Pressure Monitor
“If you didn’t get tingles coming down that hill, you are dead,” said Darryl Snyder of Windsor, Ontario, whose son, Brad, was eliminated in the qualifying.
At this level, most athletes tend to get their chills from competition. Kristin Heaston of Palo Alto, Calif., whom the draw made the first to throw, will forever be known as the first woman to compete at Olympia. Women were barred from the ancient Games, even as spectators.
Yet Heaston’s first reaction was disappointment over not making the 12-woman final won by Irina Korzhenenko of Russia.
“I probably needed to think a little more about what I was doing rather than what I was doing in history,” Heaston said. “But how can this be negative?”
Nia Athanasopoulos, an Olympia native, could not wait to watch the final after missing the qualifying because she was at work as a cleaning woman.
“I don’t care who wins,” she said. “I am just happy to have the event here and that, after all these years, the Olympics have come back to Olympia.”
It had been 1,711 years since the Roman emperor Theodosius, trying to cleanse his dominions of pagan rites, shut down the Games in 393 A.D.
Aeolus, the god of wind, must have gotten a consciousness-raising lesson in the intervening millennia, for he favored only the women with a zephyrous breeze during the morning qualifying.
“Seeing women take part was very touching for me,” said Olympia Katsali, who owns one of the souvenir shops that line the town’s main street.
Almost none of the thousands of shot put day-trippers ventured the two blocks from the main street to the one-room Olympic Museum, a poor relation to its palatial counterpart near International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Olympia museum contains a few medals, pictures, torches from the torch relays that begin here and a handwritten list of ancient Olympic champions. Its oddest artifact is the silk-lined wooden box used to carry Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s heart from Switzerland to Olympia, where the creator of the modern Olympic Games asked that it be buried. His wish was granted a year after his death in 1937.
“You feel the nostalgia of the past,” said museum visitor Socrates Antonopoulos, a Canadian whose Greek ancestors came from the area near Olympia.
“I would hope the athletes feel the presence of historical events. It might push them to do something they might not do somewhere else.”
That did not happen Wednesday, when 28 of the 60 throws in the men’s competition were fouls, and the winning distance was the shortest since 1976. Yet no complaints were heard about the conditions.
“This has been a world-class venue for 3,500 years. Why would it change now?” said Nelson, his sentiment more accurate than his dates.
“In this environment, everyone was pushing hard for great things. Sometimes you go beyond the limit.”
American John Godina did, fouling on two of his three throws and failing to make the final eight. He had won bronze and silver medals in the previous two Olympics.
In the morning, Godina talked of wanting to imagine how it was in the old days, when some competitors were condemned to death if they did not win. Hours later, Godina felt too ill to stand and talk about his own competitive demise.
“I’m going to go over there,” he told a meet official.
And he walked away from the stadium, back under the arch, out of history to the van that would return him to the 21st Century forever.