Next time someone tells you nudity is shocking, remind them where the Olympics came from. In ancient Greece, competing naked wasn’t a scandal. It was simply how sport was done, and the athletes were celebrated in marble and on painted pottery for it.
- 776 BC
- Traditional date of the first Games at Olympia
- Gymnos
- Greek for “naked”, the root of “gymnasium”
- 1,000+ years
- How long the ancient Games ran
1. The ancient Games
By tradition, the first Olympic Games were held in 776 BC at Olympia, a sanctuary of Zeus in the western Peloponnese. The only event was a sprint, the stadion, and the first recorded winner was Koroibos, a cook from the nearby city of Elis. (Ancient writers believed there were earlier games too, so 776 BC is really the start of the records rather than the sport.)
Over the following centuries more events were added:
- Stadion: A sprint of one length of the stadium, about 192 metres. The only event at the first Games.
- Pentathlon: Added in 708 BC: running, long jump, discus, javelin and wrestling.
- Boxing: Added in 688 BC, with leather straps wrapped round the hands.
- Pankration: Added in 648 BC, a brutal mix of boxing and wrestling. Only biting and eye-gouging were banned.
2. How the nudity began
The earliest athletes wore a loincloth or girdle. How that changed depends on who you ask, and the ancient Greeks themselves told competing stories.
The runner from Megara. The travel writer Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, tells of Orsippus of Megara, who won the sprint naked in 720 BC while his rivals still wore girdles. Pausanias guessed that Orsippus let his girdle slip off on purpose, “realising that a naked man can run more easily than one girt.” The famous version where he lost it by accident is a later embellishment.
The Spartans. Other writers credited a Spartan runner at the same Games. The historian Thucydides, writing in the 5th century BC, said the Spartans were the first to strip and oil themselves for exercise, and that loincloths at Olympia had gone out of use only a few years before his time. Plato agreed that naked exercise came from Crete and Sparta.
Modern historians tend to trust Thucydides and Plato over the later legends. Either way, by the 6th century BC athletic nudity was normal: hundreds of painted vases from that period show naked athletes training and competing.
3. Why naked?
It’s even in the language. The Greek word gymnos means “naked”, which gave gymnazein, “to train naked”, and gymnasion, the place where you did it. Every time you go to the gym, you’re using an ancient word for training in the nude.
The Greeks left no single explanation, but historians point to a few reasons:
- It was practical. Running and wrestling are easier with nothing to snag or grab.
- It celebrated the body. Greeks linked athletic, well-trained bodies with excellence and virtue, and saw nothing to hide.
- It set them apart. Greek writers contrasted themselves with their neighbours. Herodotus wrote that among the Lydians and most foreign peoples “it is felt as a great shame that even a man be seen naked.”
Some popular explanations, such as stopping cheating or proving athletes were men, have no ancient source behind them. They make good stories, but treat them as guesses.
Greek nudity still had its own rules of modesty. Some athletes tied the tip of the foreskin with a thin cord, called a kynodesme, because showing the glans in public was considered shameful. As we explore in why we wear clothes, ideas about what counts as modest have always varied.
4. Oil, dust and the strigil
Before training, athletes rubbed olive oil into their skin. Afterwards they scraped off the mix of oil, sweat and dust with a curved bronze tool called a strigil. Nothing went to waste: the scrapings were sold as a remedy for aches and sprains.
5. Where were the women?
Women couldn’t compete in the men’s Games, and married women weren’t allowed to watch. Pausanias reports only one woman ever caught: Kallipateira, a widow who disguised herself as a trainer to watch her son compete, around 388 BC. She was found out as she jumped the trainers’ barrier, but spared because her father, brothers and son were all Olympic champions. Afterwards, a new rule said trainers had to be naked too.
Women had their own games, the Heraia, held at Olympia in honour of the goddess Hera, with foot races for unmarried girls. And one woman did become an Olympic champion: Kyniska, a Spartan princess, whose horses won the chariot race in 396 and 392 BC. In chariot racing, the owner was crowned, not the driver.
6. The end, and the revival
The ancient Games ran for more than a thousand years. Tradition says they ended in AD 393 under the Christian emperor Theodosius I, though many historians think they faded out a few decades later. When Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics in Athens in 1896, the athletes wore clothes, and they have ever since.
But the ancient Games are a reminder that shame about the naked body is not some timeless rule. For over a thousand years, one of the world’s greatest civilisations put naked athletes at the centre of its most important festival. Today, nearly 7 million people in the UK call themselves naturists, and Greece itself still has some beautiful bare beaches. Our founder’s favourite is on Corfu.