The Royal Mint has just released some gold coins to celebrate the London Olympics. John Bergdahl, who designed them, explained the source of his ‘inspiration’ as ‘the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece, where the first athletes pledged their allegiance to the gods of Olympia.’
Really? That ‘gods of Olympia’ will have set the alarm bells ringing for most readers, because there were no ‘gods of Olympia’. There were gods of Mt Olympus, but it is unwise to stage events like chariot races on mountains, and Olympus was 140 miles from the place where the Games were actually held every four years for nearly 1,000 years from 776 bc, i.e. Olympia in the north-west Peloponnese. And why was it called Olympia? Because it contained a huge sanctuary dedicated, not ‘to the gods of Olympia’, but to one god of Olympus, father of them all — Zeus himself, the loud-thundering encircler of the earth, lord of the storm cloud, god of all the Greeks, master of the universe.
Not, however, on the Royal Mint coins. There he is god of diving, and is called Jupiter, god not of the Greeks but the Romans, as are all the other gods on these coins to whom, apparently, athletes prayed ‘at the first Olympic Games’. Zeus’s terrifying wife, the ‘Great Goddess’ Hera, becomes Jupiter’s wife Juno and goddess of pole-vaulting.
This hysterical codswallop is ‘justified’ by the Mint because the Olympic motto is in Latin. But the fact that a Latin motto is not a Greek one might have dropped the teeniest of hints that it had little to do with the ancient Olympics. It was in fact dreamed up in 1894 by a friend of Baron de Coubertin, the inventor of the modern Olympics, and was first unveiled at the Paris Olympics in 1924.
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