Come the Olympics, the fever of sports grips every die hard sports enthusiast. Since the time of the Greek Olympics, competitive sports have always held viewers enthralled as competing teams and nations pit their very best of their talents against each other.
Various facts about the Olympics are in abundance, and more records are broken as well as new records are set with every new edition of the Olympics.
Here is a quick look at some of the interesting and even, at times, strange facts about the Olympics.
- Contrary to the long held belief behind the Olympics torch relay dating back to the Greeks, the fact remains that the tradition of the torch relay traces back to the 1936 Olympics that were held in Berlin and was conceived as a scheme by which the superiority of the Aryan race would be established for the world to see. Thus, the torch relay race that has come to be synonymous with the Olympics actually originated as nothing more than one more tool of Nazi propaganda.
- Do you know that the popular Olympics logo of five intersecting rings in black, red, blue, yellow, and green was not randomly designed with a random choice of a color scheme. The designer of the Olympics logo used these colors for the express reason that one of these colors features in the flag of every participating nation.
- The modern Olympics are all about team colors, but quite interestingly, the original Greek Olympics required the participants to compete completely naked. In fact, the word, “gymnasium” is derived from the Greek, “gymnos” and indicated a school where people performed exercises in the nude.
- The youngest ever person to compete in the Olympics of the modern period was a young Greek gymnast named Dimitrios Loundras, who was 10 years old when he took part in the 1896 Athens Olympics.
- Currently, while an athlete can be suspended from playing only when the blood alcohol level is high enough to cause injury, the first ever person to be suspended from playing in the history of the Olympics was suspended because he tested positive for alcohol before the pentathlon event.
- The wrestling match between Russian Martin Klein and Alfred Asikainen of Finland in 1912 holds the record of being the longest spanning match of the Olympics till date, with Klein winning after a grueling 11 hours. Ironically, he was so exhausted from the long drawn match that he was unable to participate in the final.
- The only person to ever win an Olympics game without even realizing that she was taking part was Margaret Abbot of the United States, who thought she was taking part in a golf tournament that was being held as part of the World’s Fair at Paris in 1900.
