Olympic gold medallist Jonathan Edwards investigates some of the religious and mythical ideas that lay behind the very first Olympic Games.
At the centre of the site at Olympia was the Temple of Zeus, and inside it was one of the wonders of the ancient world: Pheidias’ statue of Olympian Zeus. The statue was made of gold and ivory and was almost 12 metres tall.
One of the stories about the beginning of the Games was that descendents of Hercules ran the first running races. The Olympic Stadium was supposed to be the distance Hercules could run with a single breath!
