Chapter 1: What Even Are Olympic Rules, Anyway? A Total Beginner’s Crash Course

If you’ve ever yelled at your TV because a gymnast’s score seemed way too low, or argued with a friend about whether a soccer player was offside, or wondered why the Olympic marathon is exactly 26.2 miles long (spoiler: it’s a total accident), you’ve already bumped up against the weird, messy, often arbitrary world of Olympic rules. Before we dive into the tiny tweaks that rewrote the history of the Games, we need to nail the basics: what counts as an Olympic rule, who actually gets to write them (hint: it’s not just the fancy guys in suits at the International Olympic Committee), and why these rules exist in the first place. Let’s start with a quick trip back to where it all began: the ancient Olympics, where “rules” were less like binding laws and more like loose suggestions you could ignore if you were fast enough, strong enough, or had enough money to bribe the judges.

Ancient Olympic Rules: More Like Guidelines, Really

The ancient Olympic Games, held every four years in Olympia, Greece from 776 BCE to 393 CE, are the spiritual ancestor of the modern Games, but their rulebook would feel like a joke to any 21st-century athlete. For starters, there was no single, written set of rules that applied to every event. Rules were passed down orally, varied by event, and were enforced by a group of aristocratic judges called the *Hellanodikai*, who were selected from Greek city-states and served four-year terms. They swore an oath to judge fairly, but in practice, bribery was rampant, and their decisions were final—no instant replay, no appeals committee, no way to overturn a bad call.

Take wrestling, one of the most popular ancient Olympic events. The written guidelines said you couldn’t bite, kick, or gouge your opponent’s eyes, but enforcement was spotty at best. The most famous example comes from 564 BCE, when wrestler Arrhichion of Phigalia found himself in a chokehold so tight he was starting to lose consciousness. Rather than tap out, he reached down, broke his opponent’s toe with his bare hand, and made the guy scream in pain enough to surrender. Arrhichion was declared the champion—then promptly died of asphyxiation from the chokehold. No one disqualified him, because the rule said you win if your opponent surrenders, even if you die immediately after. Safety? That was a secondary concern, if it was a concern at all.

Rules around preparation for events were equally lax. The famous wrestler Milo of Croton, who won six Olympic titles across 20 years, was said to eat an entire roasted calf, plus 20 pounds of bread, 10 pounds of meat, and several liters of wine the day before a competition. No one told him that was a bad idea, because there were no rules about pre-competition diet. Athletes also used performance-enhancing substances freely: mushrooms, poppy juice, and even ground animal testicles were common “supplements,” because there was no anti-doping rulebook to ban them.

There were rules, of course—just not the ones we’d recognize today. Only free Greek men could compete; slaves, women, and foreigners were banned from entering the stadium, and any woman caught watching the Games could be thrown off a cliff. Events had basic guidelines: the five-event pentathlon (long jump, javelin, discus, short sprint, wrestling) required you to place in the top three of the first four events to qualify for the wrestling match, for example. But there was no standardization across events, no universal code of conduct, and no way to enforce rules consistently across the 293 editions of the ancient Games that ran for nearly 1,200 years.

By the time Roman Emperor Theodosius I banned the Games in 393 CE for being too pagan, the ancient Olympics had less of a rulebook and more of a loose collection of “hey, maybe don’t kill your opponent” suggestions. When French educator Pierre de Coubertin revived the modern Olympics in 1896, he wanted to bring back the spirit of the ancient Games—but he also wanted to avoid the chaos. The problem? He and his organizing committee had almost no playbook to work from.

The 1896 Revival: Making Rules Up As You Go

The first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896, were cobbled together in less than two years with a shoestring budget and zero precedent for how to run a global multi-sport event. The organizing committee had to write almost every rule from scratch, and they made a lot of very weird choices in the process.

Take the opening ceremony. There was no rulebook for how to run an opening ceremony, so they just copied the ancient Greek tradition of a parade of nations, but they added a weird twist: each country’s delegation had to march behind a flag bearer carrying a sign with their country’s name written in Greek. No one told the U.S. delegation that, so they showed up with a sign that said *1896 Olympian Games* in English, and the Greek crowd booed them for not following the “rules.” There was no written rule requiring Greek signs, of course—it was just an unwritten norm that no one had thought to communicate.

Competition rules were equally ad-hoc. There was no standard track surface: the running track was made of cinder, and many athletes complained it was too soft to run fast on. There was no standard pool size for swimming events, which were held in the open ocean in the Bay of Zea; the water was so cold that half the swimmers dropped out before the race even started. There was no weight classification for weightlifting, so the heaviest lifter almost always won, and there was no rule against using lifting straps or other aids, leading to wildly inconsistent performances.

The most infamous example of rule chaos from the early modern Olympics, though, comes from the 1904 St. Louis Games, held as part of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (a giant world’s fair). The organizers were so focused on the fair that they barely bothered to run the Olympics properly, and the rulebook was little more than a set of suggestions. The marathon, in particular, was a disaster of epic proportions.

The race was run on a 24.8-mile dusty road in 90-degree (32°C) heat, with exactly one water station at the 11-mile mark. Organizers didn’t provide any other aid stations, because there was no rule requiring them to. Of the 68 starters, only 14 finished. The winner, British-born American Thomas Hicks, was carried for 10 miles in a car by his coaches mid-race, then fed a cocktail of brandy, egg whites, and strychnine (a toxic rat poison that was, bafflingly, sold as an over-the-counter energy supplement at the time) to keep him conscious. No one disqualified him, because there was no rule against riding in a car, no rule against mid-race stimulants, and no rule requiring organizers to provide water or aid to runners. One runner was chased off course by a pack of wild dogs. Another, Cuban postman Felix Carbajal, showed up in long trousers and dress shoes, stopped mid-race to steal peaches from a roadside orchard, and still finished fourth.

The 1904 Games also featured the only Olympic event in history where athletes competed in “anthropology days,” where Indigenous people from around the world were brought to the fair to compete in “primitive” events like mud fighting and pole climbing, while fairgoers bet on them like they were horses. There was no rule against this, because the organizing committee saw no problem with treating human beings like zoo exhibits.

All of this chaos made one thing very clear: the modern Olympics needed a standardized, consistent set of rules, or they would collapse into farce within a few decades. But who gets to write those rules? The answer is more complicated than you think.

The Three-Tiered Olympic Rule System: Your Cheat Sheet for Understanding Who’s In Charge

If you’ve ever assumed all Olympic rules are written by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the fancy Swiss-based organization that runs the Games, you’re not alone—but you’re also wrong. Olympic rules operate on a three-tiere