The Modern Olympic Games — 1896, 2016 and Beyond: Can Elite Sport Spectacles Incite Movement among the Masses, or Do They Merely Foster Spectatoritis? (original) (raw)

Abstract

I n the autumn of 1896 readers of the first volume year of the American Physical Education Review-now known as the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (JOPERD)-learned about the first Olympic games of the modern era, which were reborn on Orthodox Easter Sunday, April 5, 1896 (Clark, 1896). Among other things, those games produced the first Olympic champion to be crowned in 1,527 years (Olympic.org, 2015). The American James Brendan Connolly won the "gold medal" for his performance in the hop, skip and jump-known today as the triple jump-on April 6, 1896, in the grand marble Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, Greece (Clark; Olympic.org, 2015). (The original first-place medal was not made of gold, but of silver. For those living in or traveling to the Boston area, a statue of Connolly is located in South Boston at Joe Moakley Field [Russo, 2012]. He also finished second in the high jump and third in the long jump at the 1896 games.) But this Viewpoint is not about James Connolly or any other individual Olympian. Nor is it a historical account, social critique, or tribute per se. It does not seek to set the record straight on any controversial matters, nor does it enter into the debate about challenges facing the games (e.g., commercialization, doping, ethics, facilities, gender verification).

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