Unit 10 · Nations and New Rosters

Olympia is a valley in southern Greece. In ancient times it held a sanctuary, a holy place, for the god Zeus. Greek tradition dates the first recorded Games there to 776 BCE. Historians treat that date as a tradition, since later writers built the list of winners.

The Games were held every four years. The Greeks called that four-year gap an Olympiad and used it to count time. The oldest event was the stadion, a footrace one length of the stadium. Later festivals added wrestling, boxing, chariot races and the pentathlon.

Only free Greek men and boys could compete. Enslaved people and foreigners could not. Married women were generally not allowed to watch, according to the Greek writer Pausanias. Unmarried women at Olympia had their own footraces in honor of the goddess Hera, called the Heraean Games.

The festival lasted into Roman times. Historians usually place its end around 393 CE, under the Christian emperor Theodosius I, who banned pagan festivals. The exact final year is still debated. Earthquakes and floods later buried much of the site until excavations in the 1800s.

Much Wenlock is a small market town in Shropshire, England. In 1850 a local doctor, William Penny Brookes, started the Wenlock Olympian Games there. They mixed footraces and cricket with prizes for reading and knitting. Brookes hoped exercise and learning would help working people in his town.

Greece held its own revival too. A rich merchant, Evangelos Zappas, paid for Olympic games in Athens in 1859. More were held in 1870 and 1875. Greece had won independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, and the games were meant to link the new nation to its ancient past.

In 1890 a young French educator, Pierre de Coubertin, visited Much Wenlock. Brookes held a special festival for him. Coubertin later built an international version of the idea. The modern Games came from these local attempts, not from nowhere.

This matters for how we read the history. Coubertin is often called the founder of the modern Olympics. That is true of the international committee he helped create. But a town doctor and a Greek merchant had already shown that the ancient name could draw crowds.

In April 1896 the first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens. The main stage was the Panathenaic Stadium, an ancient stadium rebuilt in white marble. A Greek businessman, Georgios Averoff, paid for much of the rebuilding. Crowds filled its long, narrow seats.

The International Olympic Committee counts about 241 athletes from 14 nations. All of them were men. Many were students or members of private clubs, not national teams picked by trials. Some simply paid their own way to Greece.

The most famous result came in the marathon, a new long-distance race based on a Greek legend about a runner from the town of Marathon. A Greek water carrier named Spyridon Louis won it. For the host nation, his victory turned a sports meet into a national celebration.

The 1896 Games set patterns that lasted. A host city built or rebuilt a stadium. Athletes were sorted by nation in the results. And the Games were meant to move to a different city every four years, so no single country would own them.

Coubertin drew the five rings in 1913. He described them in the IOC’s magazine, the Revue Olympique. The rings are blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white field. They are linked to show many parts joined together.

Coubertin wrote that the six colors, counting the white, could make the flag of every nation of his time. In later years many people said the rings stand for five continents. Either way, the flag is a symbol: an object that stands for an idea bigger than itself.

The flag first flew at the Antwerp Games in 1920. That year the Belgian fencer Victor Boin spoke the first Olympic oath. He promised, for all the athletes, to compete fairly and follow the rules. An oath for judges was added in 1972, and one for coaches much later.

Symbols like these gave the Games a ceremony that did not belong to any one country. Each host added its own music and flags. But the rings and the oath returned every time, linking one Games to the next.

At the first Games, some athletes entered on their own or through clubs. Over the next years the IOC required entries through a National Olympic Committee, or NOC. An NOC is a body in each country that picks and sends that country’s team. The United States Olympic Committee grew from such a body.

The opening ceremony shows this system in public. Teams march into the stadium one country at a time, each behind its flag. Since the 1920s, Greece has usually entered first to honor the ancient Games. The host nation enters last.

The medal table in newspapers counts medals by country. The IOC does not officially rank nations, but the press has done so for over a century. That habit turns single athletes into a score for a whole nation.

The NOC system also means a place without an IOC-recognized committee cannot send a team. So questions about who counts as a nation, such as divided Germany after 1949 or Taiwan and China, became questions for the Olympic movement too.

The IOC chose Berlin in 1931. Two years later, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany. The new government pushed Jewish people out of German sports clubs. In the United States, many people called for a boycott: refusing to take part as a protest.

The Amateur Athletic Union, which controlled much American track, argued over the boycott. In December 1935 its members narrowly voted to send athletes. Avery Brundage, head of the American Olympic Committee, led the side that wanted to go.

German organizers added a new ritual. Under Carl Diem, a flame was lit at Olympia in Greece and carried by runners to Berlin in the first Olympic torch relay. Film director Leni Riefenstahl turned the Games into a film called Olympia. Both linked the Nazi state to ancient Greece.

Athletes’ stories did not fit the government’s message. Jesse Owens, a Black American from Ohio State University, won four gold medals. Helene Mayer, a German fencer with a Jewish father, was placed on the German team and won a silver medal. The stage was built for propaganda, but it held many stories at once.

The 1956 Summer Games in Melbourne, Australia, faced two crises. In the autumn, Soviet troops crushed an uprising in Hungary. The Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland stayed home in protest. Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon stayed away over the Suez Crisis, when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt.

South Africa raised a different question. Its law of apartheid, or racial separation, kept Black South Africans off its national teams. Other nations and African sports leaders argued that such a team broke the Olympic rule against discrimination.

The IOC withdrew its invitation to South Africa for the 1964 Tokyo Games. In 1970 it expelled South Africa’s Olympic committee. South Africa did not return until the 1992 Barcelona Games, after the country began to end apartheid.

These cases show two tools. A boycott is chosen by the nation that stays home. An expulsion is chosen by the IOC, which removes a member. Both use the Games as a stage to say something about a government.

In 1976 a New Zealand rugby team toured South Africa. African nations asked the IOC to bar New Zealand from the Montreal Games. The IOC said rugby was not an Olympic sport and refused. More than twenty nations, most of them African, left or stayed away.

In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter called for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. In April 1980 the United States Olympic Committee voted to go along. More than sixty nations did not send teams, and American athletes who had trained for years stayed home.

In 1984 the Summer Games went to Los Angeles. The Soviet Union announced it would not attend, citing safety. Most of its allies in Eastern Europe joined it, though Romania came. Many historians read the 1984 boycott as a reply to 1980.

The chart shows how the number of nations rose and fell. Each boycott changed who stood on the medal stand. Record books from those years list real winners, but they did not face the full field.

After the Second World War, Germany split in 1949 into West Germany and East Germany. Each had its own government and wanted its own Olympic team. The IOC recognized West Germany’s committee first, in the early 1950s.

The IOC pressed the two states to share. From 1956 to 1964 they sent a unified team. It marched under one flag, black, red and gold with the Olympic rings, and used Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in place of an anthem.

From 1968 the two Germanys competed as separate teams. East Germany built a state sport system that won many medals. Later it was revealed that the system gave many athletes performance drugs, often without telling them.

Germany reunited in October 1990. At the 1992 Games in Albertville and Barcelona, one German team competed again. The story shows that an Olympic team is a political decision about which government speaks for a people.

In 1901 the IOC chose Chicago to host the 1904 Summer Games. Chicago had hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and its leaders wanted another world event. The University of Chicago’s president, William Rainey Harper, was among the backers.

St. Louis was planning its own world’s fair, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, for 1904. Its organizers planned sports events of their own. The two cities competed for the same summer. The IOC moved the Games to St. Louis, where they became part of the fair.

The 1904 Games stretched over months and mixed with fair events. Few athletes crossed the ocean to reach the middle of America. The IOC counts only twelve nations, and most of the athletes were American. Historians often call these Games the weakest of the early modern era.

The story shows that a host city is a bid, not a birthright. Money, transport and other events decide where the Games land. Chicago bid again for the 2016 Games, and the IOC chose Rio de Janeiro.

Before the modern Games, many sports had local rules. A footrace in America might be 100 yards, while one in France was measured in meters. To meet, nations had to agree on one set of rules and measures.

International federations do this work. Each one governs a sport across the world. Examples include FIFA for soccer, founded in 1904, the athletics federation now called World Athletics, founded in 1912, and FIBA for basketball, founded in 1932. The Olympics use metric distances set by these bodies.

The Olympic program, the list of sports, has changed often. Tug of war was an Olympic event from 1900 to 1920. Judo entered at the 1964 Tokyo Games, and taekwondo in 2000 at Sydney. Baseball was a medal sport from 1992 to 2008 and returned at the Tokyo Games held in 2021.

A sport joining the program usually adopts one world code. Local styles and rules may fade as athletes train for the Olympic version. So the Games can spread a sport widely while making it more alike everywhere.

In 1923 a group called the Women's Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation formed. Lou Henry Hoover, wife of the future president Herbert Hoover, was one of its leaders. Its members were mostly women who taught physical education in schools and colleges.

The Women’s Division opposed star players, big crowds and championships for girls. Its leaders worried that fierce contests would harm girls or turn them into entertainment for paying fans. They favored play days, where students from several schools were mixed onto new teams for friendly games.

The idea spread widely. By the 1930s many high schools and colleges had few interschool contests for girls. Some states, such as Iowa, kept strong girls basketball, but in much of the country girls’ sport was kept small on purpose.

Historians read this in two ways. Women teachers did control girls’ sport and shaped it by their own values. But the result was that girls had far fewer teams, coaches and trophies than boys for decades.

Since the early 1970s, the National Federation of State High School Associations, or NFHS, has counted players each year. It asks every state association, including the IHSA, how many students played school sports. These counts let historians compare one year with another.

In the 1971–72 school year, the NFHS counted 294,015 girls. It counted 3,666,917 boys. That means about one athlete in every thirteen was a girl. Many schools had no girls teams at all in some sports.

One year later, in 1972–73, the girls count had risen to 817,073. By 2018–19 it was 3,402,733. The count of boys also rose, but the gap narrowed. A participation count does not show quality of coaching or fields, but it shows who had a spot on a roster.

The Illinois High School Association was founded in 1900. It is a voluntary association: member schools agree to follow its rules and send teams to its state series. For most of the 1900s its state champions were boys’ teams.

Boys basketball held its first IHSA state tournament in 1908. Boys wrestling crowned its first state champions in 1937. Girls in Illinois had school clubs and some meets, but no IHSA state title in most sports.

In the 1970s the IHSA began state series for girls. Girls basketball held its first IHSA state tournament in 1977. Each new state series meant new rules, officials, schedules and a trophy for girls across Illinois.

On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972. It was a long bill about schools and colleges. Its ninth part, or Title IX, was one sentence of thirty-seven words.

In the Senate, Birch Bayh of Indiana sponsored it. In the House, Edith Green of Oregon and Patsy Mink of Hawaii worked for it. Mink was the first woman of color elected to Congress. After her death, Congress renamed the law the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in 2002.

The sentence covers any education program that receives federal financial assistance, meaning money from the national government. Nearly every public school and most colleges receive such money. So the law reached almost every school in the country.

The words sport and athletics do not appear in the sentence. Supporters mainly had admissions, hiring and classes in mind. But school teams are an education program, so the sentence applied to them too.

A law often needs regulations: detailed rules written by a government agency to explain how it works. For Title IX, the agency was the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, called HEW. While HEW wrote them, college sports leaders pushed back.

In 1974 Senator John Tower of Texas proposed exempting sports that earned money, such as college football, from Title IX. Congress rejected the Tower Amendment. Instead it passed the Javits Amendment, from Senator Jacob Javits of New York, asking HEW to write reasonable rules for sports.

HEW issued the regulations in 1975, and President Gerald Ford signed them. They said schools must offer equal opportunity in athletics. Schools could keep separate teams for girls and boys. Elementary schools had until 1976 to comply, and high schools and colleges until 1978.

Schools asked how to prove they were following the law. In December 1979 HEW issued a policy interpretation. It explained how the agency would judge athletics. Its best-known part is called the three-part test.

A school passes if it meets any one of three parts. First, the share of athletes who are women is close to the share of students who are women. Second, the school has a history of adding teams for the sex with fewer chances. Third, the school fully meets the interests and abilities of that sex.

The first part is often called proportionality. It became the most argued-over part, because a school could meet it by adding women’s teams or by cutting men’s teams. Supporters and critics have debated it ever since, in courts and in Congress.

Grove City College is a small private college in Pennsylvania. It took no federal money directly, but some students paid tuition with federal grants. The college refused to sign a Title IX form, and the case reached the Supreme Court.

In Grove City College v. Bell, decided in February 1984, the Court said Title IX covered only the specific program that received federal money. At most colleges, the athletic department got no federal money directly. So for a time Title IX barely reached sports.

Congress answered with the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988. It said the law covers a whole school if any part receives federal money. President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill. In March 1988 Congress overrode his veto, and the act became law.

In 1971 women athletic leaders founded the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, or AIAW. It ran national championships for college women in many sports. Women coaches and administrators led it, and it set its own rules on scholarships and recruiting.

The NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, governed men’s college sport. At first it had fought parts of Title IX. After the law took hold, it decided to offer women’s championships itself, starting in the 1981–82 school year.

Many colleges moved their women’s teams to the NCAA, which had more money and television deals. The AIAW sued the NCAA, claiming it broke laws against unfair competition, and lost. The AIAW closed in 1982. Historians note that women gained NCAA titles but lost a body women had built and led.

In 1991 Brown University in Rhode Island cut four teams to save money. Two were women’s teams, gymnastics and volleyball. Two were men’s teams. Amy Cohen, a gymnast, and other women athletes sued the university in a class action, a case brought for a whole group.

Brown argued that women were less interested in sports than men, so fewer spots for women were fair. The women argued that Brown failed all three parts of the 1979 test. The share of women among athletes was well below their share of students.

In 1996 the federal appeals court for the region ruled for the women athletes. It said interest cannot be judged by counting who already plays, because past chances shape interest. In 1997 the Supreme Court declined to hear Brown’s appeal, so the ruling stood.

The IHSA crowned its first boys wrestling state champions in 1937. From then on, Illinois boys had a full weight class system, sectional meets and a state final each winter. Schools hired coaches and bought mats for these teams.

For decades girls had no IHSA wrestling series. Some girls joined boys teams and wrestled boys in matches, where schools allowed it. National groups outside school sport, such as USA Wrestling, held girls’ events. Women’s wrestling joined the Olympic program at the 2004 Athens Games.

The gap shows how an institution can open a door slowly. Title IX required fair chances overall, but it did not require a girls team in every sport. A state association still had to vote to create a new state series.

In the 2021–22 school year the IHSA added girls wrestling as a sanctioned sport, one it officially runs with a state series. Schools could now enter girls teams in girls-only meets. The first IHSA girls wrestling state finals took place in February 2022.

The IHSA did not act alone. Other state associations had added girls wrestling before Illinois, and more followed. Growing numbers of girls on boys teams showed there was interest. Each state association made its own vote and set its own rules.

The first girls state finals came in the same year as Title IX’s fiftieth anniversary, June 23, 2022. The two papers on the bulletin board, the 1972 law and the new roster, came from different offices. But the second grew out of the chances the first required.