Tracing the Olympiad's Chronological Arc

Abstract

Modern purists prone to lament the tenuous links between the Olympic Games of antiquity and today's quadrennial extravaganzas often cite the four-year Olympic cycle as a symbol of continuity and permanence. Yet the Olympiad also evinces a striking historical paradox: this benchmark of ancient calendar reckoning has emerged, in our time-sensitive age, as a source of both chronological and semantic confusion, fragmenting into contextual strands bearing little relation to time cycles, the Olympic Games or sport. In revisiting these ancient--modern links, this article holds that the Olympiad's importance has traditionally been derivational and its precision relative rather than absolute. Multiple uncertainties persist over how the ancient festival was scheduled, affixed as a four-year cycle and retro-dated to 776 bce, reflecting wider struggles to forge a universal calendar standard in a fragmented Greek world. Such knowledge gaps, and the Olympiad's obsolescence as a recognised time frame, give new perspective to the definitional flaccidity and juridical half-life now associated with it. In its post-2000 switch from games-to-games to calendar-year reckoning, the IOC belatedly modernised the Olympiad cycle amidst a downgrading of its chronological significance. Alternative applications, however, evoke unexpected elements of continuity from antique notions of agonistic competition as a societal underpinning.