Did the Olympics really start in a small Shropshire town?
4The 33rd Olympiad will open in Paris on July 26, 2024.
With more than 12,000 athletes, 33 different sports, and more than 330 events, it’s far removed from the first modern Olympics held in Athens in 1896. Then, just 241 athletes, all male, from fourteen countries, principally Greece, Germany, France, and Great Britain, took part in forty-three events.
But, did you know where the first modern Olympics were held?
If you guessed Athens, Paris, or London, you’d be wrong. The answer – unbelievably – is a small town in England called Much Wenlock in rural Shropshire.
Much Wenlock’s Olympian Games first took place in 1850, almost 50 years before Athens played host to the event in 1896. The sports ranged from foot races and hurdles to ’tilting the ring on horses’ and ‘knitting for girls’!
But how did a small market town in Shropshire become the founder of the world’s greatest international sporting event? The truth is stranger than fiction…
The Much Wenlock Olympics were the vision of one man, William Penny Brookes, a doctor who lived in the town. He wanted to stage a major event to improve people’s health and fitness.
This visionary Victorian also served as a Justice of the Peace, dealing with cases of petty crime, and this fuelled his desire to develop opportunities for physical exercise for the working classes, aimed at their moral improvement.
The first Games were held in October 1850 and were a mixture of athletics and traditional country sports such as quoits, football, and cricket. The early Olympic Games also included a ‘fun’ event such as a blindfolded wheelbarrow race or elderly women’s race for a pound of tea!
It’s entertaining to read the Much Wenlock Olympic programme from 1867. Big events included ‘putting the stone’, the ‘standing long leap’ and the 400 yards foot race, but there was also room for ‘glee singing’, arithmetic, sewing, and knitting competitions.
How you organise an Olympic knitting contest baffles me. I can only imagine that long rows of knitters lined up to knit and pearl the fastest scarf or woolly jumper.
There was also a special ‘throwing the hammer’ event exclusively designed for limestone quarrymen and lime-burners in the parish of Wenlock. I can’t imagine why the competition was limited to this exclusive group of working men.
In a modern twist, the Olympics also featured football with teams limited to no more than 20 men per side.
The Much Wenlock Olympic winners won medals, books, and money – and were crowned with a headpiece made of ornate olive branches.
Even young boys were rewarded in the children’s races. Boys under 14 years old ran a 100 yards race
Dr. William Penny Brookes worked tirelessly to campaign for the revival of the ancient Greek Olympic Games. He was keen to get international support and invited the French educationalist, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, to the Much Wenlock Games in 1890.
Coubertin heaped praise on the Wenlock Games and it inspired him to create the International Olympic Committee in 1894. The Baron carried the Olympic baton forward and made both men’s dreams a reality. The first Modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896.
Earlier, Dr Brookes had tried to create a National Olympian Association which aimed to develop competitions in cities across Britain, but his attempts to encourage the internationalization of the games came to nothing. He also helped start an Olympian Games at the Crystal Palace, London in 1866.
Brookes was determined for the Games to be open to everyone, of every class. As Director of the Wenlock Railway Company, he had been instrumental in bringing the railways to Much Wenlock. During the Olympics, he insisted that working-class men were allowed to travel free by train to the Games.
Both men shared a passion for physical education and were thinking along similar lines about reviving the ancient Olympics. Brookes started writing letters to Coubertin, and the two exchanged ideas about sport and the Olympics.
in 1890, Coubertin visited Much Wenlock to see the Olympian Games for himself, arriving at the town’s old Railway Station in the pouring rain. It is thought the two men talked about their shared ambitions for the International Olympic Games. for the first prize of 5 shillings (about 25 pence today).
There were even prizes for the weirder events including Greasy Pole Climbing and Throwing the Stone, both of which sound like amusing contests.
Other Videos By Britclip
Other Statistics
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 Statistics For Britclip
There are 71 views in 1 video for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. Less than an hour worth of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 videos were uploaded to his channel, less than 0.07% of the total video content that Britclip has uploaded to YouTube.