Christopher Howse, The Daily Telegraph, Weekend section, July 24 04

The modern Olympic ideal is completely alien to the spirit of the Greek original, which despised women, slaves and foreigners and celebrated sectarian religion, nudity, pain and winning at any cost.

1. Oil all over
Oil was the great thing about the original Olympic games - olive oil, not Brent crude. The kit in every athlete's locker was a pottery flask of oil to rub over his body before training or public competition. That oil-rub embodied the prohibitions of the Olympic games: no clothes, no women, no slaves, no foreigners - not exactly modern sporting values. Jesse Owens won gold at Hitler's Olympics; as a non-Greek he wouldn't have got to the starting-block at Olympia.

A law attributed to Solon forbade slaves even to oil themselves, let alone compete. (Slaves were also forbidden to take boys as lovers, of which more later.) No perfume could be sweeter than good olive oil, says Xenophon in his drinking-party dialogue, the Symposium - oil is the smell of the free man working out in the gymnasium, where slaves are barred.

What was the point of this oiling? It protected skin from the sun, some say, or against the lacerations inflicted in violent ancient sports. Or it made dust easier to scrape off afterwards. Some modern writers think that oil and dust originally disguised the hunter's scent from his prey, an unconvincing idea. Others invoke Christian anointing as an analogy. That is a bit thin too. When Elizabeth I complained at her coronation that the oil stank, she was not resisting a complete body rub.

Yet there is something ritual in athletic oiling. An ancient Greek, after initial explanations (suppleness, insulation), would probably say "It's just something you do. It's obvious.'' Equally obviously to Romans such as Pliny oiling was disgusting, all one with the Greeks' other vile vices.

2. Original stew
The Olympic games originated in a stew of human flesh. The story goes that Tantalus killed his son Pelops and served him up to the gods to test their discernment. Demeter failed to notice that the shoulder she had munched was human, but the other gods twigged, and restored Pelops to life, with a replacement ivory shoulder. Pelops was thought to have given his name to the whole Peloponnese, the dangly bit of Greece that looks like a dried octopus. He wanted to marry Hippodameia, whose father Oenomaus ruled the parts around Olympia - not to be confused with Mount Olympus in northern Greece. Oenomaus challenged Pelops to a chariot race, intending to spear him. But Pelops got in first, and Oenomaus's axle was fatally tampered with. So in memory of Pelops, games were held at his sanctuary at Olympia.

There are difficulties with this myth. Zeus had an ancient cult at Olympia, and Pindar (sixth century BC) says the games were founded in his honour. Those who ate meat sacrificed to Pelops were banned from the precincts of Zeus at Olympia until they were purified. Pelops appears to be an unwelcome interloper. Then, Pelops' victory was at chariot racing, but there was no such event at the early Olympics. From the first - according to the traditional dating the games were organised anew in 776 - the foot race of 600 feet, the stadion, was the big event. But for a thousand years or more, until the games were abolished by the Emperor Theodosius in AD 393, tourists were shown the ivory shoulder of Pelops - proving the foundational story.

3. Ritual sacrifices
At Olympia black rams were sacrificed in a pit in honour of Pelops, and oxen, 100 at a time, sacrificed to Zeus, the ashes from which piled up more than 20ft high over the years. What with this and no lavatories, a crowded Olympics would have been smelly, some scholars say. You'd hardly have to be a scholar. The animals sacrificed were domestic - not game from the chase. Desmond Morris in 'The Soccer Tribe' saw the goalmouth in modern football as the animal prey and the ball the weapon to secure it, as if hunting regularly evolved into games. But even if Wayne Rooney is a Merseyside hunter-gatherer, the Olympic games were about cultic sacrifice, not atavistic hunting rituals.

At Olympia the gymnasium, the stadium and the hippodrome were appendages to an enclosure called the Altis, sacred to Zeus. The oldest features were open-air, including the sacred grove from which, with a golden sickle, an olive crown was cut as the prize - not cash as at local games. Later a temple was built with a 40ft statue of Zeus in gold and ivory. After 800 years or so, a new building provided running water.The Olympic games were not sport accompanied by religion, they were religion accompanied by sport. Religion meant rites to be performed, not theology. Homer spends a whole book of the Iliad on the games at Patroclus's funeral. The warriors did not hold games because they felt like celebrating, but because it was the thing to be done.

4. War games
At first sight it seems reasonable to call the Olympic games war by other means. Yet they neither stopped war, nor were athletics valued as useful training for war. An Olympic truce guaranteed competitors and spectators safe passage, but although the games were panhellenic - for all Greeks - the truce applied only to Elis, the city-state that ran the games. Other states happily warred while the games were on.Field events proved little use in the field of battle. The javelin thrown was quite different from the spear for war or hunting, with its broad head. And the hoplite-race, run wearing helmets and carrying heavy shields, was a late addition to the Olympic programme, from 520 BC. Plutarch tells us that the soldier Philopoemen despaired of athletes making good soldiers. "The athlete eats a lot, sleeps a lot, and trains regularly, while the soldier must endure lack of food and sleep, and exert himself at irregular moments. Once he had discovered these differences, Philopoemen despised athletics. When he became a general he used to say that men who were otherwise fit for war became through athletics too delicate for battle.''

5. Sex games
Ideas we take for granted were not shared by the ancient Greeks. They thought that barbarians had big pricks, and that this was a bad thing. Crucially, the Greeks did not subscribe to what might be called the Californian ideal of homosexuality. Modern Californians tend to think that homosexuality is for grown-up men who would ideally form lifelong partnerships. The ancient Greeks took it for granted that boys, that is, adolescents, were objects of sexual gratification. That is now the sin without forgiveness. Sexual acts or even affairs might take place between grown men (as in Aeschylus' version of the love between Achilles and his friend Patroclus, hence their nervous handling by the makers of the terrible film 'Troy'). But such acts did not define men as gay. The Greeks had no word for "homosexual''.

Plenty of pieces of red-figure earthenware show sexual acts in gymnasiums and between athletes. Sometimes boys are labelled as kalos, "beautiful'', but so they are in other settings, such as drinking parties. Art and writing leave no doubt that Greeks found naked men beautiful, but nakedness was suitable only in context: the gymnasium or stadium, not the street. Contrariwise, foreigners or barbarians couldn't cope with nakedness: pots made for export to Etruria had loincloths painted on to the athletes.

Many athletes forwent sexual acts during training. Signs of sexual interest during athletics were regarded as laughable. Infibulation was common among contestants - tying a string round the foreskin to stop the penis getting in the way. This was known by the slang term kunodesme, "putting the dog on the lead''. By no means all Greek pottery showed boys; sometimes Eros hovers while a woman admires a victorious athlete. Unmarried women were allowed to watch the Olympic games, and athletes were expected to do all the better for it. In that respect the games were less "homosexual'' than modern soccer.

Plutarch tells of naked Spartan maidens competing in athletics in the sight of young men, which he thinks encouraged marriage. Degas depicts this in what has always struck me as a rather ludicrous picture, "Young Spartans Exercising'' (1860). It is in the National Gallery.

6. Forbidden women
Any married woman who attended the Olympic festival (apart from the ritually insulated priestess of Demeter) would by law be thrown from the heights of Mount Typaeum. One tried. A woman called either Callipateira or Pherenice, the widowed mother of an athlete, Peisirodus, disguised herself as a male trainer and took him to Olympia. He won, and in her elation she jumped over the fence of the trainers' enclosure, blowing her cover. She was let off the death penalty in memory of her father, Diogoras, who had been carried through the streets and pelted with flowers when his two sons won events. But it was decided in future to require trainers to present themselves naked.

In 396 a woman, Cynisca of Sparta, won the chariot race. But she was not driving. Chariot race prizes went to the owners, the drivers being slaves or professionals, who did not count. Indeed the intention of Cynisca's brother in getting her to compete was to show the event reflected no arete, "virtue'', but merely wealth. Someone saw it differently. At Olympia a black marble fragment has been found inscribed: "Cynisca, victorious at the chariot race with her swift- footed horses erected this statue. I declare that I am the only woman in all Greece to win this crown.'' There was also a separate festival at Olympia for women, in honour of Hera (Mrs Zeus). The only description of these foot-races for unmarried girls come from Pausanias, who lived in the second century AD. The girls, he says, ran 500 feet in the Olympic stadium for the prize of an olive crown and a portion of a cow sacrificed to Hera. They ran in short tunics baring one shoulder - no heroic nudity for women. A bronze figurine of just such a runner survives from the sixth century BC.

7. Two jumps ahead
One of the many risible misunderstandings of the Olympic games is the notion of the triple jump. This was invented in 1896 to explain how Phayllus, a famous athlete of the fifth century BC, jumped 55 feet. But the verse couplet that records his impressive jump also credits him with throwing the discus 95 feet, a feeble throw. One suspects a poetic inaccuracy. The jumpers performed to the accompaniment of a flute, to improve their rhythm. They also held hand-weights in an attempt to improve their lengths by the impetus; Newton showed this does not work.

Ancient Greeks would scoff at football, a modern Olympic sport, for in their own Olympics there were no team games and no ball games. Athenaeus in The Deipnosophists says ball games (using an inflated bladder) give you a pain in the neck, and he mocks the players shouting, "Get past him!'', "On his head!'', "Under!'', "Over!''. Athletics emphasised the individual, competing not against a stop-watch or any fixed standard (since even the feet measuring the race-track varied from place to place), but seeking merely to beat the best man present.

8. Winning matters
In that foundational Olympic myth, Pelops won his chariot race by cheating, and killing his rival. In the Iliad, Nestor tells Antilochus that if he smashes his chariot up in the race it will be "a delight to others'', whereas in the 1896 Olympics when a Greek athlete's bicycle (yes, bicycle) broke down in mid race, his French competitor waited till he'd mended it. For the Greeks winning was everything. There was no second or third place.

At Olympia athletes and trainers made an oath to keep the rules, sworn on slices of boar-flesh before an image of Zeus that held a thunderbolt in each hand, and was said to strike terror into men's hearts. They still went on cheating. The referees at Olympia, the Hellanodikai, had power to punish cheats, sometimes by fines. Runners who started too soon were flogged by referees with willowy rods. Starting-gates, the hysplex, were introduced later. A red-figure drinking-cup in the British Museum shows a referee with rod raised to thwack a contestant for eye-gouging. But referees were suspect. After the referee Troilus of Elis won two equestrian events in 372 BC, a law was passed banning referees from entering them.Olympic victory conferred such status that it became a reference point for dating history. Attached to each Olympiad of four years was the name of the winner of the prestigious stadion foot-race. Thus the battle of Marathon took place in the third year of the Olympiad in which Tisicrates of Croton won the stadion for the second time. Victors were given a celebratory banquet at Olympia. Pindar wrote odes to them, and they would return home to wild fame. There names lived after them. They were heroes.

9. Victory through violence
The famous athlete Arrhachion won his third Olympic victory even though he had just died, because at that very moment he had broken the toe of his opponent, who submitted. Arrhachion was perfectly legally strangled. The event was pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling which remained determinedly violent despite rules against biting and eye- gouging. Kicking and breaking fingers were quite all right. Sport and games are inappropriate words for what the Greeks were up to at the Olympics. Competitive exercises were called agon, connected with our word agony. Gymnikos agon - naked struggle - was athletic competition. Athletes expected ponos, pain, both in training and in the event; the god Ponos was the son of Eris (strife) and Erebus (darkness). Winners had arete, virtue, of a sort.

10. Olympic whiff-whaff
When the Olympic games were revived in 1896, the only winner from the host country, Greece, was Spyridon Louis, in the marathon. The marathon was an entirely spurious event. The story goes that Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens with news of the victory against the Persians, and then fell down dead. But the story is a late one, about someone else. Much earlier, Herodotus tells of Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta before the battle to seek help. The runner covered the 150 miles or so in two days. In any case, the 26 miles 385 yards of the marathon is not the distance from Marathon to Athens, but the distance from Windsor Castle to White City, from the London Olympics of 1908.

The flavour of the revived Olympics is clear from the nine sports chosen in 1896. Apart from the solecistic triple-jump, there were the fashionable pastimes of cycling and lawn tennis, the latter dating back to 1874 when it was unsuccessfully marketed under the patented name sphairistike. For the next Olympics, in 1900, golf (won by America) croquet (won by France) and cricket (won by Britain) were added. Ping- pong (otherwise known as whiff-whaff) did not become an Olympic sport until 1988. The London Olympics of 1908 included figure skating (for women). Pierre de Coubertin, the man behind the new games, refused to have women in track or field events, so in a huff feminists organised a Women's Olympics in the 1920s.

As for the Olympic flame, it is not quite true that it originated at the Nazi Olympics of 1936. There had been a flame at Amsterdam in 1928. But for Hitler's event, 3,000 runners were chosen to carry the flame from Olympia. The torches were made by Krupp's.