Zappas and the Revival of the Olympics (part 3 of "the real story of the Olympics")

Soutsos’ appeal for the revival of the Olympic Games struck a chord in many Greek hearts. Unfortunately, it did not move those who actually had the power to act, except for one man, and what an exception he was.

Evangelis Zappas was born in a village of northern Epirus (a region that today belongs to Albania). As a young man he fought in the Revolution of 1821, and after Greece gained its independence from Ottoman rule, he emigrated to Romania, where he became a highly successful businessman. He amassed a great fortune and, inspired by Soutsos’ campaign for an Olympic revival, decided to finance it. In 1856 he proposed to the Greek government a permanent revival of the ancient Olympic Games, offering King Otto a very substantial sum, but he received no reply. Soutsos, who was aware of Zappas’ initiative, published an article referring to his own earlier efforts—the 1835 memorandum and his 1845 speech—where he had suggested that an exhibition might accompany the Olympic Games, probably a concession to Otto’s government. The article bore a telling title: Evangelis Zappas. Minister Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, who had initially considered Zappas’ proposal preposterous, soon changed tone. He wrote thanking Zappas for his splendid idea but suggested instead the creation of Industrial Olympic Games, focusing on agriculture, craftsmanship, and industry. It is quite clear that Otto’s government wished to redirect Zappas’ generosity toward less athletic purposes. Zappas agreed to fund these Industrial Olympics, but he remained firm in his wish to restore genuine athletic contests. He wanted the ancient Panathenaic Stadium in Athens rebuilt in marble and provided the necessary funds for its restoration. That would not happen during his lifetime, however, and the stadium was still unfinished for the 1896 Games. It reached its all‑marble form—the Kallimarmaro—only around 1900.

The first Zappas Olympiad took place in 1859. Since the Panathenaic Stadium could not yet be used (systematic excavations would not begin until 1869), the events were held in a square in Athens. The King and Queen attended, along with members of the government, the municipal council, and thousands of spectators. Yet the result was a disappointment. The atmosphere was closer to that of a fair than a proper competition, the organization was poor, and the police had no idea how to manage such crowds. One story even tells of a policeman who abandoned his post to take part in a race. The fiasco cast a shadow on athletics and public sport.

It would take more than a decade for another Olympiad to be organized. By then Zappas had died (in 1865), but his cousin Konstantinos, his heir and devoted follower, continued his work. In 1870 the second Zappas Olympiad took place, and this time it was a great success. The freshly excavated Panathenaic Stadium was ready to host the events, giving them both dignity and symbolic weight. Many elements that we now associate with modern Olympic Games appeared for the first time at this event: an opening ceremony, a musical anthem, proper athletic attire, timekeeping, medals and diplomas for the first three athletes, sponsors, and even a closing ceremony. One feature quite foreign to the ancient Games was the presence of women among the spectators.

The success of the second Olympiad encouraged plans for a third, held in 1875. Unfortunately it proved a failure, despite the involvement of Ioannis Fokianos, who played a major role in the birth of physical education in Greece. Two main causes explain this setback. First, the Olympian Committee in charge of Zappas’ inheritance shifted its focus toward industry and the arts. Money was squandered, and the Olympic pavilion that Zappas had imagined became the Zappeion, a building for exhibitions. Second, an anti‑athletic faction complained that in the previous Olympiad athletes from the working class had been allowed to compete—and even to win. They pressed for limiting participation to youth from the “cultured class”. Consequently, only university students were admitted in 1875. A mere twenty‑four athletes competed, the crowd was much smaller, and the royal family did not attend. The press was merciless, and a disheartened Fokianos left Athens for Thessaloniki (still under Turkish rule), where he remained until 1879.

The failure of the third Olympiad gave the Olympian Committee a convenient excuse to postpone the next one. The fourth and last Zappas Olympiad did not take place until 1889. When the Zappeion was inaugurated in 1888, a royal decree ordered that the next Olympiad be held together with a commercial exposition, but the athletic competitions were twice postponed. In the end, Fokianos himself organized them and paid the expenses out of his pocket. The events were not held in the Panathenaic Stadium but in Fokianos’ small gymnasium. On the first day the crowd was so large that the contests could not proceed, so they were postponed again and finally held a few days later, with just thirty athletes taking part (mostly Fokianos’ own students).

That was the end of the Zappas Olympiads. Zappas’ dream of an Olympiad in Greece every four years remained just a dream, seized and rebranded by a French baron who convinced the world that the idea had been his all along. Meanwhile, the vast funds Zappas had set aside for athletics were diverted by the “Olympian Committee” toward projects they deemed of greater importance—though one may well ask, for whom?

Yet Greece was not alone in its attempts to resurrect the Olympic ideal. In the next post, we turn to England—and to the small town of Much Wenlock, where a local doctor’s vision would prove surprisingly influential on the Olympic story to come.

Why do we run anticlockwise?

In writing this title, I realized that it may become unintelligible to future generations. As digital clocks replace analog ones, we may need a better term altogether. Mathematics, of course, does not depend on clocks to define the direction around a circle; what we call anticlockwise is simply the positive direction. 

What spurred this post was an article I came across in which one of the co-authors was K. Nishinari. I have known Nishinari-san for many years. I have visited and lectured in his laboratory at the University of Tokyo, and we even once planned a collaboration (which, unfortunately, never materialized). He describes himself as a “jamologist,” a specialist in “jams” — traffic jams, but not only. I still remember one of his seminars, in which he explained how to avoid jams in inkjet printers. I had to follow the seminar in Japanese, a language I do not speak, yet I managed to understand the topic thanks to Nishinari-san’s excellent presentation.

This time, the question was whether there is a left-right symmetry breaking when we move in crowds. In other words, do we tend to favor clockwise or anticlockwise turns? (Perhaps I should point out to my American readers that what I call anticlockwise is what they would call counterclockwise). The article, based on a Spanish-Japanese collaboration, was published in Nature Communications. The authors found that an anticlockwise bias in roaming pedestrians is a robust and reproducible feature. It is independent of crowd size, boundary effects, laterality traits (handedness, footedness, or eye dominance), and social norms. (Admittedly, the study participants were children and young adults, which raises the question of what would happen in the case of individuals with functional limitations). More importantly, the authors showed that the anticlockwise preference originates in individual locomotor tendencies rather than in collective interactions. (This runs counter to the common belief that group-level behaviours are more than the sum of individual behaviours).

The authors do not offer an explanation for this phenomenon, but they do mention some preliminary studies of blindfolded walking, which resulted in a circular motion in one direction “due to accumulating drift in their subjective straight-ahead, possibly linked to vestibular noise”. I will not delve further into this excellent article from the Spain-Japan collaboration. If you are interested, you can find it here.

Back to the anticlockwise preference. If you are, like myself, a swimmer who has to share a training lane with more than one other swimmer, thereby requiring everyone to adopt a circulation that keeps the dividing line always on the same side of the body, it seems natural that the resulting circular motion should be anticlockwise. I cannot claim that this is a spontaneous choice: it may well be a learned behaviour. Still, I have never seen anyone turn clockwise in a swimming lane.

But let us start at the beginning. As always, we have no technical details concerning ancient Athletics. The Ancient Olympics began with the στάδιον (stadion), a run from one end of the stadium to the other. Soon, the δίαυλος (diaulos) was introduced, in which one had to run to the end of the stadium and back. Unfortunately, nothing is known about how the athletes made their turn. On the other hand, literature does exist concerning ancient chariot and horse races, and there it is clear that in the ancient Hippodrome the races proceeded anticlockwise. (I once read a curious story according to which, during Roman times, chariot races in the Circus Maximus were initially run clockwise and later changed by an edict of Nero, after he was struck by the whip of a charioteer. But I would not attach much credibility to that account).

The ancient Greek tradition did not survive into the revival of modern sport. When athletics re-emerged in the nineteenth century, clockwise running was still common, and Oxford and Cambridge are reported to have practiced it well into the twentieth century (which is hard to reconcile with the fact that the direction became standardized soon after the London Olympics of 1908). At the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, track races were run clockwise; the same was true in Paris in 1900 and St. Louis in 1904. A short video from the 1906 Athens Olympics survives, but it shows only the 110 m hurdles; even so, the layout of the track and the direction of the race suggest that clockwise running was still in place at that time. By then, however, several countries had already adopted the anticlockwise convention, and complaints were being voiced. In London, athletes therefore ran with 'the left hand inside', and some sources even mention an IOC decision in 1913 to formalize anticlockwise running. That attribution is somewhat puzzling, since the International Amateur Athletic Federation had already been founded in 1912 and was the body normally responsible for technical matters. In any case, anticlockwise track running has now been the standard for more than a century, and it is unlikely to change anytime soon. And the article by Nishinari et al. provides a scientific rationale for a convention that may once have seemed purely arbitrary.

A great long jump competition in Monaco

This year’s Diamond League season has marked the return of Miltiadis Tentoglou to the top of the men’s long jump hierarchy. His sixth-place finish at the World Indoor Championships in March had raised legitimate doubts: would 2026 extend the disappointing trajectory of 2025? That concern was not unfounded. The 2025 season had indeed been a poor one by his standards. It began with a fifth-place finish at the World Indoors and, despite a world-leading 8.46 m at the European Athletics Team Championships, the rest of the season steadily deteriorated, culminating in sixth place at the Diamond League Final and a disappointing eleventh at the World Championships. The contrast with 2026 could hardly be sharper. Tentoglou opened with 8.46 m in Xiamen, followed by 8.49 m in Cyprus, another world-leading mark at the time (later surpassed by Simon Ehammer’s remarkable 8.51 m in his decathlon world best at Götzis). A sequence of high-level performances followed, including a wind-assisted 8.54 m in June.

Then came Monaco.

Tentoglou produced a performance that reasserted his dominance unequivocally. He opened with 8.44 m, already sufficient for victory, followed with 8.52 m and 8.49 m, and concluded with a final-round leap of 8.61 m, a meeting record, surpassing Iván Pedroso’s longstanding mark, and improving his own world lead.

The competition itself reached an extraordinary level of depth. All eight athletes exceeded 8 metres, including Mattia Furlani on his return from injury. More strikingly, this was the first recorded competition in which five athletes surpassed 8.30 m.

This naturally raised a historical question: how often have all eight finalists in a major competition exceeded 8 metres?

The most immediate example is the Paris 2024 Olympic final. Tentoglou won with 8.48 m, ahead of Wayne Pinnock (8.36 m) and Mattia Furlani (8.34 m), with Ehammer fourth at 8.20 m, all four present again in Monaco. The eighth-place finisher, Jianan Wang, recorded 8.03 m. The same benchmark had been reached in earlier Olympic finals: in Rio 2016, K. Gomis placed eighth with 8.05 m, and in Sydney 2000,  the eighth-place mark was exactly 8.00 m. Turning to the World Championships, one might expect the iconic 1991 Tokyo final, defined by the Powell–Lewis duel, to qualify. Surprisingly, it does not: the eighth-place mark there was 7.99 m. Instead, the deepest competition appears to be the 1987 World Championships in Rome, where no fewer than twelve athletes exceeded 8 metres. King Carl won with a championship record of 8.67 m (a record that would not survive the following championships), while eighth place required 8.10 m and twelfth exactly 8.00 m.

Yet this competition is remembered less for its depth than for the controversy that unfolded in its final moments. Lewis had led from the outset with 8.67 m, with Robert Emmiyan second at 8.53 m. Larry Myricks held third with 8.33 m after five rounds, while Giovanni Evangelisti was fourth with 8.19 m. Then, in the final round, Evangelisti was credited with 8.38 m, moving him into the bronze medal position.

The result was immediately met with disbelief. Evangelisti was a top-class athlete, he had jumped 8.43 m earlier that season and had been Olympic bronze medallist in 1984, but analysis of the available video footage suggests that his final jump was not even beyond 8 metres, with estimates placing it closer to 7.90 m. Myricks was unable to respond. Subsequent analysis from the Sports Institute in Köln even suggested that the final jumps of both Myricks and Jefferson may have been longer than officially recorded.

Protests followed, and investigations were conducted. The IAAF maintained that all measurements were correct, stating that “it is not possible to consider the hypothesis of different measurements, carried out at a later date, as integral to or substitute for the official measuring process”.

However, the matter did not end there. Sandro Donati, then a coach with the Italian national team, filed a police report alleging that officials from the Italian federation (FIDAL) had arranged for Evangelisti to secure a medal. According to Donati, immediately before the final round the two British technicians responsible for the electronic measuring system were reassigned to the pole vault, and the system was disconnected. All final-round jumps were then measured manually, with only Italian officials present. An inquiry by the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) ultimately supported Donati’s claims. Eight FIDAL officials were implicated, including the federation’s general secretary, a close associate of IAAF president Primo Nebiolo. Evangelisti’s mark was annulled, and Myricks was reinstated as bronze medallist. Donati, however, paid a professional price, losing his coaching position after bringing the matter to light.

I have previously written about the disgraceful conduct of Soviet officials during the triple jump at the 1980 Olympic Games. The events in Rome in 1987 suggest that such practices were not an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, the actions of FIDAL officials show that this readiness to subvert competition extended well beyond the Soviet sphere.