Olympic bodies: the naked truth

As you probably saw, the organisers of the Sydney Olympics suffered the latest in a series of embarrassments this week when the medals for the games were unveiled and found to depict a Roman-style colosseum.

The feeling was that the medals should have featured a building more in keeping with the spirit of the modern Olympic movement, such as a pharmaceutical plant. Or failing that, something in keeping with the old Olympic movement, such as a Greek temple.

The Greeks founded the games, as we know, way back in the year dot (approximately). The first reliable records date from 776 BC, by which time the Olympics had taken on something like their modern shape, which was an exclusively male shape for the first millennium or two.

According to Europe: a History by Norman Davies: "The athletes, all male, competed in 10 well-established disciplines. From the seventh century BC onwards, when one competitor accidentally lost his shorts, they customarily performed naked. They were not amateurs, being accustomed to arduous training and expecting handsome rewards."

Wrestlers were among the more handsomely rewarded (although over the centuries nude male wrestling has lost out to its more popular female counterpart). Davies records that one of the greatest Olympians was Milo of Croton, who won the wrestling prize in five Olympiads between 536 and 520 BC, and to celebrate the last of them, "carried the sacrificial ox around the stadium before sitting down to eat it".

Milo would have been big on Sky Sports. And, were it not for a slight evolution in the human conscience over the past two millenniums, so would the Roman games which are now such an embarrassment. When George Orwell said that sport was war without the guns, he was close to the Roman definition, except of course that there was nothing in their rules against the use of heavy weaponry. Apart from that, the Roman games and the hype surrounding them have many contemporary echoes.

Mostly in soccer, it must be said. True, we have nothing now like the routine, mindless violence of the Roman arena, except maybe the Arsenal football team. But the dangerous and frequently fatal sport of chariot racing, for example, was dominated by stables known as the "Reds," the "Blues," the "Whites" and the "Greens". And the Roman obsession with the sport caused Seneca to complain: "The art of conversation is dead. Can no one today talk of anything else?"

Meanwhile, over at the Colosseum, where coverage would probably only have been available on Sky Box-Office, matters were getting even more out of hand. The sport there started with individual gladiators fighting each other to the death, the loser's fate often sealed by a thumbs up or down from the games president, after prompting from the crowd (Nowadays this would be done by telepoll: "Remember, the number to ring if you think Pugnax should live is 1850-999-999. Lines close in five minutes.").

But soon the sight of mere individuals killing each other wasn't enough. Interval acts were laid on, featuring everything from wild-animal hunts, to re-enactments of military battles and even naval wars in flooded arenas - always with wholesale slaughter. In one festival, a staggering 10,000 humans and 11,000 animals died, none of them from natural causes. Christians were always popular, whether they were being roasted alive, or crucified, or just thrown to the lions.

As is now happening with football, the seasons got longer and longer. Having initially been confined to four weeks of the year, the games grew to the point where the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum were "in almost permanent session". Maybe wives complained to their husbands: "Is it my imagination, or is there a slaughter of the Christians on every night?"

Of course, we know that the Christians triumphed in the end. They looked out of it for a long period, but Roman history was a 90-minute game and deep in injury time - 404 AD - the Christian emperor Honorius overruled the Senate and pulled the plug on the games. And the Christians didn't stop there. On a roll now, they put a stop to the Greeks' carry-on as well; at any rate, historians believe Christian opposition to pagan cults made the Olympics impossible to revive after the invasion of the Visigoths in 395 AD.

BY the time they were revived in 1896, the Christians had at least seen to it that the competitors had their clothes back on. Ironically, this means that modern male Olympians can reap handsome rewards from sports-clothing manufacturers; and, equally ironic, that female Olympians - admitted since 1912 - can make even more money taking them off again.

Yes, the old Greek spirit is being kept alive by female athletes - at least according to the Washington Post - which this week reported a "nudity epidemic in women's sports". Last month's Esquire magazine was "full of semi-nude Olympians" apparently; while elsewhere, four Olympic swimmers "posed in a single towel" for Women's Sports and Fitness. Most controversially, Jenny Thompson - "arguably the world's best swimmer" - went shirtless (but with strategically placed hands) in Sports Illustrated, simultaneously drawing a rebuke from the Women's Sports Foundation and inspiring thousands of men to think up new jokes on the theme of a popular swimming stroke.

The phenomenon has divided opinion among feminists, but the Post appears to come down on the side of a male art-gallery director who "interprets the trend of women athletes undressing as a pointed statement on the difference between nude and naked". My dictionary is under the impression that there's no difference, but then the relationship between language and meaning can be looser than a Greek athlete's shorts. Anyway, it's all part of the five-ringed circus that is the Olympics. Which is why I say: let the games commence. And my money's on the Christians.

Frank McNally is at fmcnally@irish-times.ie