Going Through A Revival Of The Olympics Added: 11/29/2007

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For centuries the Olympic Games were a Greek thing as the greatest athletes convened in Olympia, Greece to decide who the best athlete was and have a celebration of sport and games. The ancient Olympics started in 776BC and went until they stopped in 393AD. For almost 1,200 years people would gather regularly for a celebration of sport and to revel in the success they had created and then suddenly it just stopped. No one revived the games for centuries until a Greek named Evangelos Zappas personally paid to recondition Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, Greece and held his own Olympics there in 1870 and 1875. So after nearly 1,500 years there was a revival of the Olympics as some patriotic, and rich, Greeks decided to revive the tradition and allow the games to come back into existence yet again. In 1894 a Frenchman named Pierre Fredy Baron De Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee, or the IOC, and in 1896 De Coubertin and his new IOC held their first Summer Olympic games. There were some growing pains for the games and World War II wound up putting them on hold for a little while but they eventually caught on and a full on revival of the Olympics was on. Soon the IOC grew as the popularity of the games grew and now the Olympics is big business. But the Olympics had a few brushes with near fatality again as politics stepped in and, as it always seems to do, nearly killed the international festival of peace and competition.

In 1980 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the United States was not happy. It was the thick of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States and to show how unhappy they were the United States and its allies pulled out of the 1980 Summer Olympic games that were held in Moscow. Not to be outdone by this act of brazen ignorance the Soviets pulled out of the 1984 Summer Olympics that were being held in Los Angeles. Now there was a genuine fear that if the two super powers could not solve their Olympic differences then the games may cease to exist. Some of the best athletes in the world came from the United States and the Soviet Union and without them the games seemed meaningless. It took a business man to get the politicians to see the light when Ted Turner held his first Goodwill Games in 1986 in Moscow. Athletes from all over the world, including the United States, attended and questions about the future of the Olympics started to fade as the two super powers once again began sending athletes to the Olympic games.

Then the Olympics faced another crisis of sorts. For decades the Winter Olympics and the Summer Olympics were being held in the same year. This was causing some problems with the host cities who wanted to be known as THE Olympic city for one year and the television networks who felt that the two events in the same year was starting to become too much for television audiences. So in 1992 the ICO split the games up so 1992 was the last year that there was the Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics in the same year. revival of The Winter Olympics was held again in 1994 and they alternate every two years now. It is a much better system that lets the Winter Olympics and the Summer Olympics stand as their own event. Revival of

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