However great the achievements of athletes at the Olympic Games – and even more so the Paralympics – there will always be those who have their doubts about their real value.
Some ancient Greeks certainly felt like that about their Olympics. Complaints were made that an athlete’s physical fitness did nothing for the public health. No boxer would order the city better or stock her granaries, and surely it was valour in war that counted. A satirist pointed out that naked wrestlers covered in olive oil would not be much use in the front line of battle.
Others expressed concern about the character of the Games’ founder, Heracles, the greatest mortal ‘winner’ of them all. True, his famous 12 labours were celebrated on the 12 metopes of the massive temple of Zeus Olympios next to the Olympic stadium – six panels above the front door, six more at the back. But was that the whole story?
The name Heracles meant ‘the glory/fame of Hera’ (wife of Zeus). It was an attempt to assuage her fury, because Heracles was in fact the son of Zeus by a mortal woman Alcmena.
Having tried to kill Heracles since he was born, Hera enslaved him to king Eurystheus, who imposed on him his ‘impossible’ labours: killing a lion, some man-eating birds and a hydra; capturing a boar, a hind, a bull, some mares, some cattle, Cerberus (in the underworld), some golden apples and an Amazon’s girdle; and cleaning some filthy stables. Very heroic.
The rest of his career, less so. He did once meet Vice and Virtue who offered him respectively a pleasant, easy life and a severe but glorious one – and he selected the latter. But he also slaughtered his own children, had many sexual encounters, consensual or not, with many men and women (one night he impregnated 50 daughters of a king), sacked Troy, killed his music tutor, took on the god Dionysus in a drinking match and so on.
True, he was made a god at his death, but should one really be celebrating such behaviour?
As today, though, few athletes lost sleep over such observations. Look at the rewards for winners! And what sane man would argue with Heracles?
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