In his introductory remarks to William Baker's essay on the early
             "Organized Greek Games" of the classical era, one of the editors of The
             Western Experience, Steven Golden, writes that sports are not merely a kind
             of sideshow to a nation or a society but a mainstream component of that
             society's particular set of cultural attitudes. (Golden, 1999) In other
             words, the attitudes of a society towards sports and its athletes mirror
             the values of the larger society. This is the reason that even today, the
             Olympic games have been resurrected and continue in the form of a coming
             together of various people from different nations, languages and tribes
             from all over the world. The principle of unity and harmony between human
             beings, however tenuous and difficult in a divided land or world, is still
             The ancient games exemplified the tension between the desire for Greek
             unity of city-states, which gloriously overcame the autocratic Persians,
             according to Herodotus' Histories, during the Persian Wars, and the desire
             to affirm the excellence of individual athletes and states. (The Western
             Tradition, Chapter 2, 2004) After all, athletics are exhibitions of
             athletic glory are individual in nature, and athletes represented their
             cities, and their cities systems of values, as well as themselves. The
             tension between Greece as a country and Greece as a fractious union of self-
             governing polis was thus embodied in the form of the "Early Games." (Baker,
             Today, the Olympic games today stand as symbols of political unity and
             harmony, as the games did during the ancient Classical era as symbols of
             Greek physical excellence in an otherwise barbarian world. Of course, the
             new unity of the games is international, however, rather than national.
             Still, in a nod to Greece as the foundation of the Western tradition of the
             games, the games have been awarded once again to that nation, despite a
             c...