Creative History

  The founding charter of the Wenlock Olympian Games, written by a group of concerned citizens who wished, above all else, to improve their small town’s physical and moral health stated that the Games were established for, “the promotion of the moral, physical and the intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town and neighborhood of Wenlock and especially of the working classes, by the encouragement of outdoor recreation and by the award of prizes annually at public meetings for skill in Athletic exercise and proficiency in intellectual and industrial attainments.”   The founding charter of the Wenlock Olympian games was authored by members of a group that called themselves the Wenlock Agricultural Reading Society (WARS) in February of 1850 and its main aim was to establish something, in a true Victorian Era caste-system way of thinking that they called “The Olympian Class”.  Though, the idea of creating a so-called Olympian Class of citizens to us today ...

  Fourteen nations competed in the first ever modern day Olympic Games held in Athens in 1896. In 1894 the newly created International Olympic Committee had unanimously chosen Athens as the site for the first modern Olympic Games as an homage to the city-states of ancient Greece whose original pan-Hellenic Olympiad in honor of the God Zeus had been held every four years, for over ten centuries beginning in 776 BCE and not ending until well into the 4th Century CE, when the by then Christianized Roman authorities finally put a stop to the Pagan tradition.   Of the fourteen nations represented at the games of the 1st Olympiad thirteen were from Europe with the lone exception being the team from the United States. The Olympic Games of 1896 were considered a great success.  At the time, the First Olympiad represented the largest international sporting event ever held and the Olympic Stadium in Athens, called the Panathenic Stadium, hosted a crowd of over 100,000 ...