As the 2012 London Olympics gets underway, Paul Cartledge took a look at how the games that were first played in Greece centuries ago have evolved over time. Highlights include:

• Not only were woman not allowed to participate, they weren’t even allowed to watch the events when the Greek games were first played.
• Perhaps this was because all of the (male) athletes were nude during the competition.
• There were no bronze or silver medals. The winner received a wreath made from sacred trees. Their home city might also have rewarded them.
• The Olympics was originally a religious event.

To read more including how the sports that athletes compete in have evolved, the ancient Greek word for “exercise”, who the original Olympics honoured, the strange location of the original stadium, the one event where athletes were allowed to wear clothes, why the game began to incorporate ‘barbarians’, and the Hitler connection, click here.

Source: BBC

The 2018 Winter Olympics are set to be held right next to the North Korean border wrote Steve Mollman:

• North Korea’s recent nuclear showmanship seems to coincide with moments when their actions will receive maximum attention – during international conferences or American long weekends.
• What better way to get noticed than to engage in mischief during the winter Olympics – to be held in a border town of South Korea, just 80km from the heavily militarized line of control.
• Alarmingly it doesn’t look like North Korea will send any athletes to compete – erasing a major disincentive to threaten military strikes during the event.
• The games were awarded to South Korea back in 2014, when things on the peninsula seemed more stable.
• The tickets didn’t go on sale until recently though – and early sales have been disappointing. Only 230,000 have been sold – and organizers are starting to get creative with discounts.
• Organizers prefer not to think about athletes potentially pulling out due to safety concerns.

Read more on Quartz.

Automated facial recognition is used to tag our social media posts. It could soon make everyday life for international travelers easier, wrote The Economist:

• Currently travelers can be held up in queues waiting to show their passports in five spots: check-in, security, outbound immigration, boarding, and inbound immigration.
• Japan is looking to use facial recognition technology to automatically waive people through in its airports by the time it hosts The Olympics in 2020.
• After France introduced new security measures due to terrorist attacks, airport queues doubled. The country is looking for ways to ease the congestion as well.
• There’s still some ways to go. In 2012 Japan found that the technology failed to identify passengers correctly almost 20% of the time. Though algorithms has made massive strides since then.
• The bigger challenge could be passengers objecting on privacy grounds. But that hasn’t stopped other security measures.

Read more on The Economist.

Tim Struby wrote an article about alternates at The Olympics:

• Olympic alternates have a tough role. They have to be ready to step in at a moment’s notice, should any of their teammates fall ill, but the IOC doesn’t officially consider them to be Olympians.
• They have to stay in shape and get the right food, but it’s more difficult for them since they are denied residence at the official Olympics village, where Olympians have access to top facilities (and lots of condoms).
• They also won’t receive the swag bag – gifts from corporate sponsors that can include high end, and incredibly expensive, gear and jewelry.
• For people who are hyper-competitive, and are among the world’s best athletes, it is a humbling experience.
• The humbling isn’t limited to homo sapiens. In the Athens games, the horse that belonged to the equestrian alternate was housed in a temporary farm stable rather than the official Olympics stables.
• Possibly the worst part for alternates though, is when the world’s eyes are turned to the opening ceremonies and Olympians stand with their national flags, shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best athletes. The alternates watch the ceremony on TVs in their hotel rooms.
• There’s always a desperate hope. In 1964 boxer Joe Frazier, an alternate, had to replace Buster Mathis who had broken his thumb. Frazier would go on to win gold.
• In Sochi, a Canadian speed skating Olympian gave his spot to his alternate, believing the alternate to be the better athlete. The alternate won Silver.
• And some alternates make their names in…well…alternate ways. An East German tobogganing alternate opted to use the 1964 Austrian games to defect to West Germany.

Read the full story of the incredible effort, courage, and perseverance of Olympic alternates over here.

Read our coverage of the Olympics here.

Source: Victory Journal

There are some wild and wonderful sports around the world, and in the past some of them have even made it to The Olympics. Vanity Fair looked at some of the ones that won’t be making a re-appearance at Rio:

• Tandem Cycling (pictured) was played at multiple Olympic games between 1908 and 1972.
• Solo synchronized swimming. This sounds like an oxymoron, but the idea was that the lone swimmer was keeping synced with the music. It was tried in 1984 but was dropped by the 90s.
• Live pigeon shooting. The 1900 games were the first and last time animals were intentionally killed at The Olympics.
• Hot air ballooning also made an appearance in 1900. This and motorboat racing were removed from The Olympics once a ban on motorized sports was put into place.

Check out the full list here. Check out our previous coverage of The Olympics here.

Source: Vanity Fair

Longform journalism site Grantland is shutting down. A look back at some of the site’s more interesting articles led to this 2012 gem by Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen on how a country can go about increasing its share of medals:

• Olympic medals are unequally distributed. 65% of gold medals are won by 5% of the countries that participate.
• To win medals a country needs to increase its population. More people means more athletes to choose from.
• Countries could also import top athletes from other countries and quickly give them citizenship.
• In rare occasions exporting athletes can also help increase medals. Any country interested in winning gold medals in basketball might want their athletes to play in the NBA for a while.
• More money helps. It leads to more sporting infrastructure and education.
• Hosting the Olympics boosts medal chances, because in preparation for hosting, countries invest more in their athletes.
• This is also why countries do particularly well in the Olympics event four years before they are scheduled to host, as they already know by then that they will be hosting and have begun to invest in their sportspeople more.
• Countries benefit from focusing on their comparative advantages. Countries with long shorelines should focus on boating events, while those with high altitudes can hope for running medals.
• Specific sports can be strategically targeted. Taekwondo, which awards four medals per weight class, is a better bet than Basketball, which awards just one to an entire team.

The full article has some musings about the Olympic futures of China and India and has other interesting details. Read it here.

Source: Grantland

Google posted a list of top searches in the year so far. Andrea Chang wrote:

• Kim Kardashian didn’t break the internet this year, Robin Williams did, whose name was the #1 search of the year.
  • Perhaps hoping that Google knew where misplaced a jumbo jet, Malaysia Airlines came 4th on the list.
• The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge which we will soon be able to refer to as “so 2014” was #5 on the list.
• To the frustration of parents everywhere “Frozen” came #9 on the list.
• The Football World Cup was more popular than the Winter Olympics.

The full list is:

1. Robin Williams
2. World Cup
3. Ebola
4. Malaysia Airlines
5. ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
6. Flappy Bird
7. Conchita Wurst
8. ISIS
9. Frozen
10. Sochi Olympics

Read other insights, and check out how the most popular searches differed in the US, and see other people who trended over here.

Source: LA Times

Cracked runs Photoshop contests where readers are invited to send in funny submissions based on various prompts. Yesterday’s prompt was “Shocking Comparisons That Change How You Think of Money”. Some of the more interesting entries included:

• German hyper-inflation meant that in mid-1922 it cost 2 marks to send a domestic letter. At the end of 1923 it cost 100,000,000,000 to send the same letter.
• Russia spent $8.7 billion to build a highway to a mountain in Sochi. This was more than the budget of the entire 2010 winter Olympics.
• The band Aerosmith made more money from Guitar Hero royalties than it did from any of its albums or world tours.
• Producing a gram of anti-matter costs $62.5 trillion dollars.
• One drug lord was smuggling so much money he had to spend $2,500 a month on rubber bands for his cash.

The full article has 23 of these facts and includes points about Bill Gates’ incredible philanthropy, thoughts about the richest sports person in history, and more over here.

Source: Cracked

Alert the Queen of England! Rajeev Syal reports that a nefarious band of delinquents is considering running ads trashing the glory of Great Britain and painting it as a horrible place to live. These misfits operate out of the heart of London and are reportedly led by a Mr David Camer – wait, what?

• Next year curbs on the immigration of Bulgarians and Romanians to the rest of the EU will be lifted.
• In an effort to stem the influx of Bulgarian and Romanian citizens, the UK government is considering running ads that would point the true horrors of life in England in an effort to dissuade them from arriving.
• This is an odd twist for a country that exports image consultants that help improve the image of other countries.
• It would also diminish the legacy of the 2012 Olympics, since the whole point of hosting those games in England was to improve England’s image abroad.
• There probably won’t even be that many immigrants anyway. Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants will have over 25 countries to choose from, and will probably go for Germany.

Read more about the ads, a notable precedent, and what they might complain about over here.

Source: The Guardian

Via: Foreign Policy