Greece has risen to prominence in a number of sporting areas in recent decades. Football in particular has seen a rapid transformation, with the Greece national football team winning the UEFA Euro 2004. Many Greek athletes have also achieved significant success and have won world and olympic titles in numerous sports during the years, such as basketball, wrestling, water polo, athletics, weightlifting, with many of them becoming international stars inside their sports. The successful organisation of the Athens 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games led also to the further development of many sports and has led to the creation of many world class sport venues all over Greece and especially in Athens. Greek athletes have won a total 161 medals for Greece in 17 different Olympic sports at the Summer Olympic Games, including the Intercalated Games, an achievement which makes Greece one of the top nations globally, in the world's rankings of medals per capital
History of Ancient Greek Sports
The Archaic Age (c. 750–500 B.C.E.), especially the sixth century, was the formative age of Greek sport with city-state (polis) formation, colonization, the adoption of money, and other socioeconomic changes. When Archaic Greeks founded new colonies as independent city-states from the Black Sea to Sicily, they took their games with them, and soon they returned to watch or compete at Olympia and other sites. Interactions between dispersed Greeks and the Greek mainland raise interesting questions of ethnicity and status displayed as groups used sport for propaganda and legitimization. Like modern expansion franchises, new city-states abroad established local games to display their ethnic legitimacy, resources, and status, and they competed for prestige as homes of victors, festivals, and patrons of the sport. Sophisticated and broad, Hornblower and Morgan’s volume uses Pindar and other sources to show that athletic prestige was sought by individuals, families, and communities all over the Greek Mediterranean. Essays on regions prominent in Pindar (e.g., Argos, Corinth, Aegina, Thessaly) discuss the influence of local patronage, the regional dimensions of victory odes, and Pindar’s adaptation of local myth-historical imagery. The work also covers Western colonial elites, the tyrants of Sicily, and Greek sport in Hellenistic Egypt and the Roman Empire. 24 Applying New Historicism to Pindar, Nicholson examines the poetics of representation and omission as victors and poets attempted to re-create realities for personal and political ends. Elites and tyrants displayed their wealth and status by personal athletic competition or indirectly via equestrian events in which hired or slave drivers risked injury but the owners claimed the victories. Nicholson argues that socioeconomic changes brought challenges by non-elite citizens in Archaic and Classical Greece, moving anxious aristocrats to minimize the contributions of hired charioteers and jockeys, and paid trainers, in their victory commemorations (odes, dedications, and vases).
Olympic Games
Greece was home of the ancient Olympic Games, first recorded in 776 BC in Olympia, and hosted the modern Olympic Games twice, the inaugural 1896 Summer Olympics and the 2004 Summer Olympics; the country also hosted the 1906 Intercalated Games, at the time regarded as Olympic Games but not officially recognized by the International Olympic Committee today. The nation has competed at every Summer Olympic Games, one of the only four countries to have done so, and most of the Winter Olympic Games. During the parade of nations Greece is always called first, as the founding nation of the ancient precursor of modern Olympics, and its national governing body is the Hellenic Olympic Committee.