I know, the title does not make much sense. But read on and things will become clearer.
I have already written about the ancient pentathlon and the way the winner was determined. In this I was inspired by the writings of Zarnowski, who is the world specialist of combined events. Saying that a huge amount of nonsense has been written on the matter by historians who do not have any knowledge of sports is an understatement. Those who are interested can go back to one of my first posts where I present a variant to Zarnowski's proposal, a variant I improved in a second, more recent, post.
The myth has it that the pentathlon was invented by Jason during the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece. The first stop of Argo was on the island of Lemnos where the queen Hypsipyle organised games in order to honour them.
Peleas (he's Achilles' father) participated in all five events, discus throw, long jump, javelin throw, running and wrestling. He was twice second and twice fourth in the first four events, but he prevailed over all his adversaries in wrestling and was declared winner of the pentathlon. This would present a definite difficulty concerning the procedures proposed by Zarnowski and myself which allow only the winners of the first three events to proceed to the last two. In fact there is an very detailed article in Wikipedia dealing with the subject (it's in german but Google does a good job in translating it). The overall opinion of the article is that the analysis of N. Suppanz is the most satisfactory. I will not spend more time on this matter and will stand by my analysis in the post mentioned above.
The question I would like to address here is how could one organise an ancient pentathlon competition today. This is not a rhetorical question. In fact since 2015 the island of Lemnos has been organising an international ancient pentathlon competition. I obtained a copy of the rules and I must admit that I do not understand how the event is judged. A point based scoring system is used for the first four events and then points are attributed to the wrestling results according to the classification. However nowhere in the rules is it explained how the wrestling competition is organised. Is it a round robin or something else? No matter. The municipality of Lemnos is organising their pentathlon according to some rules. And they are having some success in this, since last year there was a participants from Cyprus, Italy and Serbia as well as teams from various places in Greece. (The Lemnos pentathlon is a team event).
The existence of a contemporary ancient pentathlon competition got me thinking. How could one organise such an event? Remember Zarnowski's approach and mine were based on victories, since, as we argued, in ancient Greece only the victory counted. And this is, I am convinced, the only way one could stage a real ancient pentathlon competition. However for a festival-like thing, as the one in Lemnos, one needs a less selective approach. So here is a rational way to organise an ancient pentathlon today. I will give in detail a scheme for 8 participants which can be easily adapted to a larger number thereof.
The participants contest in pairs, i.e. in a kind of duel. After the first events we have four with 1v (one victory) and four with 0v (zero victory). The 1v compete among themselves in the second event. This gives two with 2v and two with 1v. The 0v do the same leading to two with 1v and two with 0v. At this stage the 0v are out. At the third event the 2v compete against each other and the same for the 1v. This gives one with 3v, three with 2v and two with 1v. The later are out at this stage. At the fourth event only one with 3v and three with 2v do participate. After this event we have either one with 4v, one with 3v and two with 2v or three with 3v and one with 2v. In the first case the two with 2v wrestle for the bronze medal (the first two obtaining gold and silver ακονιτί). In the second case the three with 3v wrestle in a round robin tournament. If a clear order emerges the medals are awarded accordingly. If not all three share silver.
Extending the scheme to more participants, providing also for numbers which are not a power of two is possible, however there is no need to belabour the point. The main weakness of the scheme is that it is not quite fair. Since the pairs are chosen by drawing lots there is an inherent chance factor. Somebody who happens to be drawn against weaker opponents may be the final winner while not being the strongest competitor. But as I said the scheme is meant for a festive competition, giving a chance to half of the participants to progress beyond the third event.
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