Between 26 July and 11 August sports fans the world over will be abuzz as France hosts what is officially the twenty-third Olympiad™ – in Paris, in sixteen other sites across France and on French Tahiti, where the windsurfing competition will take place.
In French, the games are Jeux olympiques d’été de 2024™ and Jeux* de la XXXIIIe Olympiade™, and the event is branded Paris 2024™. (If you’d like some French grammar reminders, please check at the end of this post.)
The site for the opening ceremony is novel and unique: a 6-kilometre stretch of the River Seine. This has made it necessary to create a vast anti-terrorist security perimeter, much to the chagrin – now, there’s a good French loanword – of many Parisians. No matter. This year as well, Bastille Day (le quatorze juillet or Fête nationale française**) coincides with the arrival of the Olympic flame in Paris. We can be sure the City of Light (la Ville Lumière) will put on a dazzling display of pyrotechnics, literal and figurative.
Paris is the only city other than London to host the Olympic Games™ three times: this year, 1900 and 1924. In fact, the 1900 Olympics™ were the second-ever modern games, which had been recreated in Athens in 1896.
An impressive 199 nations and entities will be represented by 10,500 athletes competing in 329 events; the Paralympics™ will be held in late August, running into early September.
The athletes will compete in twenty-eight core sports. Every Olympic™ host country also has five optional slots they can fill, and France has chosen four: breaking, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing (that’s on a surfboard, not the internet!).
Breaking the mo(u)ld
‘Breaking’ is what most of us know popularly as ‘breakdancing’, but practitioners prefer ‘breaking’. What makes breaking at the Olympics very different from other sports represented is that the judges themselves will have to perform in front of the breakers and spectators. The mind boggles at how this might play out in other sports, for instance, weightlifting.
The organisers of the Athens Olympics of 1896 with its mere nine sports might puzzle at first about how breaking echoes the ideals they were promoting. But they’d soon see it encourages, among others, their virtues of physical fitness, cultural exchange and amateurism.
Since those original revived games, sports not just from outside Greece but from outside Europe have swollen the list, bringing with them non-European languages. The canoe of canoeing comes – via the medium of Spanish – from Taino, a Caribbean Arawakan language. Japanese judo combines, in a way which might surprise outsiders, an element meaning ‘softness, gentleness’ with one meaning ‘way, spiritual discipline’. And Korean taekwondo combines words meaning ‘kick’, ‘fist’, and ‘way’. The -do element, incidentally, is related to the Tao of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism.
The founders of the revived games would no doubt approve of the marathon, with its impeccable Classical Greek heritage, still being an Olympic sport, as it was in 1896. Being fans of classical language, they might smile ruefully at how the -athon part has since been sheared off and co-opted into so many other words, such as telethon, readathon, talkathon, walkathon, and so forth.
They’d no doubt give their blessing to the impeccable classical formation of the word triathlon, first coined in the 1970s, its -athlon part being the Classical Greek for ‘prize’, from which the words athlete and athletics ultimately derive.
And talking of marathons, it’s remarkable that the marathon-runner and Ethiopian national hero Abebe Bikila, a member of the Ethiopian Imperial Guard, ran the Rome 1960 Olympic marathon barefoot because running shoes he bought in Rome gave him blisters, yet he won, breaking the 1952 record of the legendary Emil Zátopek.
Olympia
The modern Olympics are so called in homage to the site in Greece of the classical games, Olympia (Modern Greek Ολυμπία). Those games enjoyed a run of a millennium plus, having been inaugurated in 776 bc and last recorded as held in ad 393. The four-year period was known as an olympiad, hence the modern, trademarked term, and became a standard time unit for recording events historically.
The site was dedicated to Zeus, and the vast temple in his honour housed one of the seven wonders of the (ancient) world, the 40-foot-high statue of him by the celebrated sculptor Phidias, creator also of the Parthenon frieze. The Olympic flame was lit at Olympia in April this year in a ceremony featuring classical-style dance and elegant maidens – korai (κόραι) – dressed in flowing pleated chitons resembling those on classical Greek statuary.
The Olympic Games have had an indirect but major effect on English literature, as follows. The Greek poet Pindar (c.518–438 BC) composed several odes about victories in the games. Poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley and, perhaps most famously, Keats in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, composed classic odes supposedly based on the structure of Pindar’s.
To medal or not to medal?
In more modern times, in previous games, and especially at the time of the London Olympics in 2012, some commentators and veteran peevemongers have questioned to medal meaning ‘to win a medal’, e.g. ‘He medalled in three of four races.’ The objection is that to transform the noun medal into a verb is an illegitimate example of verbing, the technical name for which is conversion. Whatever one’s view of this use, it looks as if it’s here to stay, as I pointed out in my edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. However, Collins wisely labels it ‘informal’, just in case, as a verbal health warning.
On closer inspection, the language of sport throws up some interesting, sometimes highly metaphorical instances of the dreaded verbing. To name but three, to astroturf, ‘to pay people to display overt and apparently spontaneous grassroots support for a particular product, policy, or event’; to barehand, in baseball, an Olympic sport since 1992; and to body-swerve, in another Olympic sport, football.
On 26 July, I shall be glued to the TV screen in the silent company of three billion or more viewers round the world. I hope you enjoy it as much as I’m expecting to.
*Jeu is one of the words you make plural by adding an -x, not an –s, just like dieu, feu, lieu, milieu and vœu.
**Remember that neither months nor nationality adjectives are capitalised in French: juin, juillet, etc.; crème anglaise, le gouvernement allemand, and so forth (et ainsi de suite).
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
