Chapter 1: The Messy Birth of the Olympic Rulebook (1896–1912)

It’s 4:17 p.m. on April 6, 1896, and the first modern Olympic marathon is barrelling toward its finish line in the marble Panathenaic Stadium of Athens. The crowd is screaming so loud you can barely hear your own thoughts, waving Greek flags and shouting the name of the leading runner: Spiridon Louis, a 23-year-old Greek water carrier who’s been running on sun-baked dirt roads for 40 kilometers already, his face streaked with dust and sweat, his tattered white shirt clinging to his back. As he rounds the final bend, a man in an official’s navy blazer is running right alongside him, yelling encouragement in Greek—his coach, also the race’s head judge. No one is holding a stopwatch. No one is marking the time. The only timing device in the entire stadium is a sundial perched on the stands, and no one has thought to check it when Louis crosses the line.

The crowd erupts. The judge who was running next to him pumps his fist and yells “He wins! Our boy wins!” Louis stops, bends over to catch his breath, and looks around confused. He had no idea he was in a formal race, let alone that he’d just won the first Olympic marathon in an untimed 2 hours and 58 minutes— a time no one bothered to record officially, because the rulebook said nothing about mandatory timing for long-distance events. The only thing the 9-page 1896 Olympic rulebook mentioned about the marathon was that it would start in the town of Marathon, Greece, and end in Athens, a distance of roughly 40 kilometers (the exact route was adjusted three days before the race, when the organizing committee decided the original path was too long for the horses pulling water carts for runners). No rules about pacing, no rules about water stations, no rules about what counted as a finish line. The only official eligibility rule was that you had to be a man, and preferably Greek—though two foreign runners had been allowed to enter at the last minute, after the Greek organizing committee decided it would look bad if no one else showed up.

This is the messy, unregulated, chaotic birth of the modern Olympic Games, a far cry from the tightly scripted, rule-bound global spectacle we know today. For the first 16 years of the modern Olympics, from 1896 to 1912, the rulebook was less a set of binding guidelines and more of a rough suggestion, rewritten on the fly by host nations, judges who were often event organizers with clear biases, and athletes who showed up to find the rules had changed before they even laced up their shoes. The 1896 rulebook was so thin you could fold it into your back pocket, and it contained almost no standardized rules for events, no official scoring guidelines, and no global governing body with the power to enforce consistency across host nations. The result was a series of Games that were equal parts thrilling and infuriating, where home-country athletes got preferential treatment from judges, events ended in controversy that left casual fans scratching their heads, and athletes trained with no standardized event requirements, often preparing for multiple unrelated events with no specialized coaching at all.

Over the next 16 years, this chaos would force a small group of early Olympic leaders—most notably Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat who founded the modern Games, and a handful of early International Olympic Committee (IOC) members—to fight for the first wave of standardized rules that would lay the groundwork for the Olympic movement as we know it. This chapter walks through that messy birth, unpacking how the loose, unregulated rules of the early Games shaped the three core pillars of this book: what spectators watched, who won, and how athletes trained. By the end, you’ll understand why the first modern Olympics felt less like a global sporting event and more like a series of neighborhood block parties, where the host got to make all the rules, and no one had the power to stop them.

The 9-Page Rulebook That Wasn’t Actually a Rulebook

To understand the chaos of the early Olympics, you first have to understand how little thought was put into rules in the first place. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, had spent years lobbying for a revival of the ancient Greek Games, but he was far more focused on the symbolic value of the event—promoting international peace through amateur sports—than on the nitty-gritty of rulemaking. When the IOC was founded in 1894 with just 14 members (all of them French or European aristocrats, no athletes or event organizers among them), the group voted to award the first Games to Athens, the birthplace of the ancient Olympics, with barely any discussion of what rules would govern the event. The Greek Olympic Committee, eager to prove they could pull off the Games on their own, told Coubertin to stay out of the planning, and promised to send over a rulebook “in due time.”

What arrived in Paris six months later was a 9-page document that read more like a rough event schedule than a set of binding rules[^1]. It listed 13 events across 9 sports, with no descriptions of how those events would be run, no scoring guidelines, no eligibility requirements, and no penalties for breaking rules that didn’t exist. For track and field, the only rule was that races would be run on a grass track (no mention of lane widths, starting procedures, or hurdle heights). For swimming, the only rule was that races would be held in the open sea (no mention of lane markers, distance markers, or what to do if the tide changed mid-race). For weightlifting, the only rule was that athletes would lift barbells (no mention of weight classes, standardized barbell weights, or how many attempts each athlete got). The only explicit rule in the entire document was that women were not allowed to compete, a decision Coubertin later claimed was based on his belief that women’s sports were “inappropriate for the public gaze.”

The lack of rules wasn’t an accident—it was a product of the fact that no one had ever organized a global multi-sport event before, and the Greek organizing committee was under immense pressure to pull off the

The lack of rules wasn’t an accident—it was a product of the fact that no one had ever organized a global multi-sport event before, and the Greek organizing committee was under immense pressure to pull off the Games on a shoestring budget, with just 18 months of planning time after the IOC awarded Athens the first modern Games in 1894. The committee’s priority was securing funding from the Greek government and wealthy private donors, not drafting 200-page rulebooks for events that no one had ever run at a global scale. When IOC president Pierre de Coubertin asked for a copy of the full rulebook three months before the Games, the Greek committee told him the “details would be finalized on-site” and that he was welcome to come to Athens to help, if he had the time. Coubertin, who was busy raising funds for the Games across Europe, declined, and assumed the Greeks would figure it out. They didn’t.

What unfolded in Athens in April 1896 was less a sporting event and more a series of improvised experiments, where judges made up rules on the spot, athletes argued with officials mid-race, and spectators left confused about what they had just watched. The 9-page rulebook was referenced less than a dozen times across the entire 10-day Games, and most disputes were settled by a show of hands from local organizing committee members, most of whom had no experience running international competitions. The chaos wasn’t just a minor inconvenience—it directly shaped the three core pillars of the Olympic experience that this book will explore for the next 125 years: what spectators watched, who won, and how athletes trained.

The 9-Page Document That Launched a Thousand Controversies

To understand how a 9-page rulebook could cause so much chaos, you first have to understand what it actually contained (and, more importantly, what it di