A Few Words on “Olympic” — “Olympic Game”

27,899 characters2008.08.08

I had long said I would write some articles about the Olympics, but the reason I kept putting it off was mainly that I had read far too little, whether primary or secondary sources, on ancient Greece, so I would certainly be speaking without much confidence. Recently, in a last-minute dash, I read a few introductory books; of course that does not really solve anything, but in order to get something written before the opening of the Olympics, I could only make do.

Though I lack confidence, I have always had ancient Greece and the “Olympic spirit” on my mind, and I have a large heap of related thoughts. Because of limits of time and ability, I still cannot sort these ideas out systematically, so I can only write a few scattered reflections for now. Once they are systematized, they will become another “central axis” of my philosophy, besides the starry sky and love—namely, “game.”

What is the “Olympics” I am talking about? Simply put, it is “Game”: it is play or contest; it is “game.”

Of course, both modern people and the ancient Greeks have endowed the concept of “the Olympics” with all sorts of ideas. For example, according to one modern official formulation: “The Olympic ideal is to pursue excellence, fair competition, participation above all, friendship, peace, and a celebration of humanity.” (Apparently from the Olympic Charter.)

The question is: how can a “Game” possibly carry so many lofty ideals? Is it merely that we pile together all sorts of pleasing-sounding ideals and force them onto “the Olympics”? Or do these ideals really have an intrinsic connection with “the Olympics”?

If it is the latter, then what is the origin of these connections? Of course, we can trace these ideals, along the thread of “the Olympics,” back to Mount Olympus in ancient Greece, back to the spiritual world of the ancient Greeks—the “Olympics” was an invention of ancient Greece, and the ideals of the Olympics are naturally the legacy the ancient Greeks have left us.

Then the question becomes: are all these lofty ideals really all derived from the tradition of ancient Greece? If so, why were these great ideals able to take root and sprout simultaneously among the ancient Greeks? And how did they achieve unity within ancient Greek culture?

Of course, not all pleasing ideas were invented by the ancients. Just as Teacher Wu Fei mentioned on his blog earlier, “universalism” is an utterly modern invention (see http://epr.ycool.com/post.2977812.html); likewise, expressions like “One World, One Dream” are obviously creations of modern people. So is it really appropriate to embed these ideals within the Olympics?

All these questions call for tracing one thing—what, in the end, is the core of the Olympic ideal? What thread links together so many different ideals?

Perhaps the “Olympics” have no single governing line at all; all the ideals it carries are merely gathered together in a “family resemblance” sort of way, with no intersection or commonality. But the “history” of the family members is still worth tracing—among the family members of the ideals belonging to the “Olympics,” which are the most original ancestors, and which are recently added distant relatives? All of this still requires us to return to the “starting point” of the “Olympics”—what, originally, was the Olympics like as an activity?

Right from the start I emphasized the simplest answer: the Olympics is a “Game,” that is, play or contest, that is, “game,” that is the sports meet we see before us.

Of course, this Game we see has been wrapped up in all kinds of political and monetary elements, making it bloated and ugly, but that is inevitable. For the Olympics is an activity that is most real-world. Precisely because it is so honest and so simple, it becomes so entangled with the most real forces of this society. If the Olympics were a sacred rite detached from reality, merely a fairy-tale “performance,” then perhaps it could avoid being stained by those ugly things; but the Olympics is not a mere performance, it is a gathering that allows everyone to pay attention and participate in the most sincere way. So how could it possibly appear perfect? There is no “perfection” in the real world; perfection is only an idea, and exists only in imagination and performance.

Some people naively think that the Olympics of ancient Greece were purer and more sacred, but this is of course wishful thinking. Almost all the unpleasant things mixed into the modern Olympics can be found in the classical Olympics as well—professionalization (ancient Greece not only already had professional athletes, but also professional coaches and sports “agents.” Like the modern Olympics, the Olympics itself had no prize money, but the victorious athletes could receive generous rewards from the city-state or its sponsors); using the popularity of the Olympics to place advertisements on a grand scale (although there was no marketing of branded commodities in antiquity, poets and painters could use the Olympics to generate public opinion for their works); making a fortune off the Olympics; corruption, bribery, and collusion between power and money; vanity and snobbery; promiscuity and improper conduct (in this respect ancient Greece was far more “spectacular” than the modern world); use of banned substances (though antiquity had no stimulants, there were still quite a few who illegally used magic and curses); using the honor of champions to build momentum for the policies or even wars of the city-state; extravagance and wastefulness (for example, as a ritual, the slaughter of one hundred white bulls at the same time)…… (See Tian Ti’ao Yun, Heavenly Olympics.)

Thus we can see that the Olympics is a genuinely authentic “human festival.” Although in ancient Greece the Olympics was first and foremost a religious rite, ancient Greek religion itself was extremely worldly. We see that the gods of ancient Greece had the same outward appearance and the same seven emotions and six desires as human beings, and even had more vicious deeds and disgraceful records than ordinary people. Nor were the artists of ancient Greece as wild in imagination as artists in other cultures; they did not know how to use abstract or symbolic techniques at all, and only knew how to express things in a naked, unvarnished way. Whether in sculpture or poetry, they were so straightforward and plain. Perhaps for the ancient Greeks, the most perfect ideal was precisely the most naked reality.

Another common criticism of the modern Olympics is that training Olympic athletes is of no help to “physical exercise”: the training of these outstanding athletes is not only unrelated to the physical exercise of the whole people, but for the athletes themselves it damages rather than improves their physical condition. But this is by no means a feature unique to the modern Olympics. Although the ancient Greeks pursued bodily beauty and the comprehensive perfection of body and mind, the reality was not necessarily ideal. For example, Greek wrestling competitions did not have many prohibitions; both victors and losers often ended up battered all over and even unrecognizable, and very few wrestling champions were able to keep a complete set of teeth. As for high-intensity daily training, it inevitably harmed the athletes’ health as well. The famous physician Galen believed that athletes were the most useless people: “Everyone knows that athletes are extremely simple-minded; under their powerful flesh-and-blood bodies, their souls seem mired in mud. But the fact is that they too cannot enjoy the blessings of the body. Ignoring the old standards of health, abandoning everything, athletes use up their lives in training, eating, and sleeping like pigs. Their coaches fatten the athletes and exercise their limbs. Athletes rarely live to old age; even if they do, they are plagued by disease and become disabled. By then they are neither healthy nor beautiful; they become fat and bloated. Their faces are slack and ugly, all thanks to the trauma left by boxing.” (See Heavenly Olympics, p. 96)

Though Galen’s words are vicious, they do indeed apply to many professional athletes in both antiquity and the modern world. But this does not amount to a negation of the Olympics—the Olympic ideal may include all kinds of things, but it probably does not include concepts like “exercise the body, live long and healthy,” because the Olympics is a Game, not physical exercise. To judge the Olympics by whether it is conducive to physical training is to miss the point entirely.

Still, the Olympics is of course closely related to physical exercise, and Coubertin went so far as to take the promotion of physical training as one of the main meanings of reviving the Olympics. But the “physical training” promoted by the Olympic ideal is not any kind of physical training undertaken for practical utilitarian ends. That is to say, what it advocates is not physical exercise aimed at health and longevity, nor physical exercise meant to better serve production, construction, or military combat. Such training is for the sake of gaining glory and victory, for the sake of “pursuing excellence.”

What is “excellence”? Health and longevity are certainly not the condition of excellence; as for phrases like “the comprehensive harmonious development of body and mind,” these are nothing more than lofty-sounding rhetoric. The “excellence” pursued by the ancient Greeks was simple and direct: it was, as Homer sang, “always to strive first, to surpass others”; “no glory can exceed that of a living person winning victory with his own hands and feet.”

The Greek “excellence” is also translated as “virtue” or “moral excellence.” Here modern people may find it hard to understand. We can of course understand that virtue is a condition for becoming excellent, but to say that excellence is identical with virtue is harder to accept; and if one then says that excellence is simply “always to strive first, to surpass others,” the problem becomes even greater. Especially from the Chinese point of view, the image of a person of high virtue and wide reputation is usually one of indifference to fame and gain, and of not competing with the world—how could such a person possibly be combative and eager to win?

But the Greek “excellence” really and truly does have the meaning of “virtue”; “wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance” were called by the ancient Greeks the “four virtues.” Here another paradox appears: the virtue of “temperance” is obviously completely out of place amid the scene of indulgence and revelry at the Olympics.

Greek culture is precisely this full of tension: on one side stands Apollo, advocating temperance and reason; on the other stands Dionysus, with indulgence and revelry; on one side stands the idealism of philosophers who only look up at the sky and cannot see the muddy pit beneath their feet; on the other stands the realism of religion and art, which concern themselves only with earthly happiness and the gods among human beings…… What is most marvelous is that these conflicts somehow coexist in ancient Greeks’ spiritual world in an extremely natural way, not merely failing to seem disharmonious, but instead becoming organically one and inseparable,

Even if we do not say whether these seemingly opposed traits share the same root, just seeing that the ancient Greeks could sustain this coexistence of tension is astonishing enough. From the perspective of cultural history, the gods of ancient Greece represent cultural traditions from different regions, which ultimately converged into a unified Greek culture and maintained a powerful cultural cohesion even though they never formed a unified political regime.

What contained these tensions? What brought together Greeks from different city-states? The most important activity, of course, was the Olympics! The ancient Greeks even used the Olympics to date time (for example, the third year of the Nth Olympiad), and the existence of the Olympics made all Greeks share the same time.

In the end, what carries so many ideas and tensions is precisely this “Game” called the Olympics. Rather than saying that the ideals of the Olympics came from the spirit of ancient Greece, it would be better to say that the spirit of ancient Greece came from the Olympics: all the spiritual forces of this nation converged and mingled in the Olympics, and from it acquired the power to surge forth and spread onward..

The spirit of ancient Greece precisely derived from “Game,” from the tradition of play and competition. In fact, “game” can be said to be humanity’s civilization itself. This formulation is not my invention. The Dutch scholar Huizinga, in his famous book Human: The Player, discussed in detail that “true, pure play is one of the main bases of civilization” and that “those forces that give civilization life and strong impetus have their roots in myth and ritual: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All these forces are rooted in the original soil of play.” (p. 5)

What, exactly, is “game”? First of all, game is “playing”; all the features of game and the various spirits that arise from it all originate from this “playing.”

Meddling with dolls, crawling about on the ground, roughhousing with companions—such frolics all count as “playing.” But this is the most primitive and simplest kind, and such play is necessary even for the development of other mammals. Through these most primitive forms of play, children establish their relations with the world and with others, and in doing so they practice certain skills of survival.

But the essence of game does not lie in its significance as skills training; rather, it lies precisely in its lack of utility. Game is spontaneous, voluntary, and undertaken simply for play without needing a utilitarian purpose; only then does it count as game. But animals lack self-consciousness; their play is merely the manifestation of instinct, whereas human beings can consciously “choose” to play games. In this way, game becomes an experience of “freedom.”

One may say that the concept of “freedom” comes from “game”: not commanded by others, not something one has to do for some other purpose, not painful and unwilling, but an activity carried out spontaneously and voluntarily. That is “game,” and at the same time it is our most original understanding of “freedom.” A person who has never played games is probably hard-pressed to understand the ideal of “freedom”!

Huizinga says: “Here we obtain the game’s most important characteristic, namely that game is voluntary, is freedom in fact. The second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely that game is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. On the contrary, it enters from ‘real’ life into a temporary but fully dominated sphere of activity,” (p. 8)

Game is an activity that transcends “real life”; the player always reconstructs the world within some domain and reshapes the relations between things. The more advanced and complex a game is, the more markedly it is detached from reality. For example, when a child plays with dolls, the child assigns them fictitious roles; games like cops and robbers, eagles catching chicks…… likewise rebuild their own territories, not to mention the complex and self-contained order established by board games and sports competitions, and the entire intricate world created by modern video games. Playing games is first of all people’s most real need; this need is not only earthly, but immediate and present. The distant otherworld has nothing to do with games, but games at the same time require detachment from reality; thus they build a bridge between ideal and reality.

Through game, people experience the order of the world on the one hand, and design new order within it on the other. Thus the following two concepts are closely related to game: “law” and “principle” — “rules” and “ideas”; “order” and “ideal”…… A person who never plays games probably finds it hard to imagine different “possible worlds.”

Why do people design all kinds of rules for games? The purpose of designing rules is not to bind oneself; on the contrary, people pursue richness, pursue change and novelty, and that is precisely why they need order and law. A baby’s random grasping and crawling has no rules; a child’s frolicking and roughhousing has only the simplest etiquette. But as people grow, these games can no longer satisfy them; such monotonous play soon becomes boring. People need newer and richer games, only then are they fun and durable. Thus people begin to establish rules and design order, making diversity possible. A skeptic who rejects all order cannot possibly be a pluralist, because what he rejects is precisely the precondition that makes diversity possible.

So we see that as people gradually grow, the games they prefer shift from simple frolics lacking order and able only to provide fleeting pleasure toward games that are increasingly orderly and capable of providing a gentler but more lasting pleasure, because the “worlds” these games provide are richer.

But the complication of the game world does not mean the complication of “order.” On the contrary, “order” is always best when it is simpler, more coherent, and more stable. For an overly cumbersome rule system is frightening and will greatly reduce a game’s playability. Only when simplicity of rules and richness of content achieve a balanced coexistence is a game both playable and durable. Go, for example, is such a high-level game: its basic rules are so simple and clear, yet its changes are so rich that it can be said to be a paradigm among advanced games. Continuing along the path of pursuing order, simplicity, and interest, “science” and “law” took root and sprouted under the tradition of game. Within “order” and “simplicity” we also find “beauty” and “harmony,” and thus under the tradition of game there also arises the development of aesthetics and art. Huizinga says: “Within the play-ground there prevails an absolute and peculiar order. Here we encounter another very positive feature of play: it creates order, it is order. It brings a temporary, limited perfection to an imperfect world and to chaotic life. The demand for order made by play is absolute and supreme. The slightest deviation from order ‘spoils the game,’ robs it of its character and makes it worthless. The deep connection between play and order is perhaps the reason why play— as we incidentally remarked— seems to belong to the sphere of aesthetics to a considerable extent. Play has certain tendencies to become beautiful. This aesthetic factor is probably identical with the impulse to create an ordered form, which animates all aspects of play. The terms by which we may designate the play-element mostly belong to the terms by which we describe the effects of beauty: tension, balance, equilibrium, conflict, variation, solution, etc. Play captivates us; it is ‘enchanting,’ ‘spellbinding.’ It possesses the highest qualities we can perceive in things: rhythm and harmony.” (p. 10)

In addition, within the concept of “law,” besides “order,” there is also “justice.” And this concept likewise comes from “game.”

People first experience freedom and order through game, and also experience justice and equality through it. The reason is still the simplest one: game must be “fun.” An unequal game is often not fun. Playing chess is always one move for you and one move for me; only with equal conditions is it fun. If you can make five moves whenever I make one, then it cannot be played. If a soccer game is eleven people against one person, then it cannot be played. If wrestling is three people against one, then it is no fun…… Through game, each person can most directly and urgently experience the spontaneous demand for justice. Perhaps someone who has never played games can still understand the concept of “justice,” but it is obvious that a person who plays games can experience it more directly and more intimately.

Similarly, games also help people understand “honesty.” Why should people be honest? Again, the simplest reason: if you are not honest, it is no fun. Being deceived by an opponent is of course unpleasant, and victory gained through deception likewise cannot make one proud, because the purpose of a game is not to win, but to play. Only winning fairly and through one’s own ability can give people a sense of honor and accomplishment.

Further, games also teach people “respect” and “friendship.” Why should one respect the other side? Still the simplest reason: if you do not respect him, it is no fun. Only when you defeat someone sufficiently outstanding can you gain a sense of glory and accomplishment. And if a healthy person were to play chess with an intellectually disabled person, or wrestle with an amputee—clearly, bullying the weak and winning cannot make one proud. Only if you say, “My opponent is respectable,” can your victory be glorious; and if you say, “My opponent is a stupid idiot and simply not worth mentioning,” then what is the value of defeating him? Similarly, games teach people mutual friendship. On the one hand, games maintain and promote intimacy between people; on the other hand, only playing with friendly friends is joyful, whether he plays the role of your teammate or your opponent, and if he is an enemy who makes you feel sick at the sight of him, how could the game possibly be fun? Therefore, in order to play games, you must not turn your partners into sworn foes. Someone who does not understand games can find comrades-in-arms and enemies; their relationships all need to be sustained by utilitarian goals, and only a common enemy can make them travel together, but they are not truly friends. Once the enemy is gone, their comradeship is hard to maintain. But true friends can keep company in a world without hatred, because they do not need to fight together; they only need to play together.

Games also teach people to appreciate the value of honor and cultivate in them a longing for a higher realm. Although games teach people to transcend utility and move toward freedom, they are not teaching people to become “without desire and without demand”; rather, they are meant to seek a nobler happiness beyond utility. A person without desire and without demand can only be called numb, not noble—just as a machine can “serve the people” with no complaint and no selfishness, and with extremely high efficiency, but it is by no means a sublime being; it is not even human. Only when you are “taking joy in helping others,” acting in order to obtain your own “joy,” can you be said to possess a noble virtue. Originally, “virtue” is precisely such a desire to pursue sublimity and excellence; this is true not only in ancient Greece, but also in the original meaning of the Chinese character “德” (de), which likewise means “to climb upward.” Games are precisely what can encourage people to strive upward in a direction beyond utility, to pursue victory and excellence, to pursue glory and distinction. It is not asking you to be a “screw” and live mechanically and unfreely, but rather to let you freely pursue virtue.

Finally, one must speak of “peace,” the idea most often entrusted to the modern Olympic movement, and yet also the most questionable. The Olympic Games are plainly contests and competitions; why, then, can they carry the idea of peace?

When we look at the torch relay ceremony symbolizing the transmission of peace, we may perhaps think this comes from ancient Greek religious tradition, but little do we know that this was in fact Hitler’s invention. One must remember that the ancient Greeks were such stubborn realists that they could not have designed such richly meaningful “symbols.” The reason the ancient Greek Olympics “spread peace” was not because there was some peaceful symbol within the Olympics, but still for the simplest consideration: to play. The agreement of “peace” was intended to ensure that Greeks from all places could arrive safely and in time at the Olympic venue; it is as simple as that. The truce period was not uniform among the city-states, but was generally determined by the round-trip journey to Olympia from that city-state. Thus it is clear that the “peace” required by the ancient Greek Olympics was not supported by any notion of world harmony; the purpose of the truce was merely to ensure that that higher and more splendid battle could be carried out smoothly.

The Olympic spirit is absolutely not about putting an end to struggle; on the contrary, it is precisely a celebration of struggle. But this struggle does not refer to that kind of war brought on by fighting over interests or by differences in opinion; it refers instead to war as game. The Olympic truce is precisely the continuation of war, the highest form of war. Ancient Greek warfare was a sacred game. Freedom was the premise of the game; in ancient Greece slaves could not go to the battlefield, much less serve as cannon fodder at the front. Only free men had the right to fight, and those who charged at the very front were “heroes,” the outstanding ones. A war might even be resolved through a “one-on-one duel” between the “heroes” of both sides. “One-on-one dueling” is a more “excellent” form of war than a brawl of cannon fodder, because it is more “fair” and can better display glory. And the Olympics are precisely a more sublime mode of warfare than “heroic duels,” because it is the most fair, the most interesting, and the most capable of displaying the victor’s excellence.

Huizinga, of course, does not neglect the examination of ancient Greece either: “In ancient Greece, there was no transformation from ‘war to game,’ nor was there a transformation from game to war; what existed was only a culture developed in game-like competition. In Greece, as everywhere, the game element was present and meaningful from the very beginning. Our point of departure is precisely the childlike concept of play, a concept embodied in all kinds of games, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and all products of culture, because these games allow humanity’s inner needs for rhythm, harmony, change, alteration, contrast, climax, and so on to be displayed in comprehensive richness. Twin to this game consciousness is the spirit that pursues honor. Magic and mystery, heroic longing, the meaning of music, sculpture and logic—all seek form and expression in noble play. The later generation would call the age that understood these aspirations the ‘heroic’ age.” (pp. 71–72, p75) … “Even if merely as fiction, these imaginings that regard war as a noble game of honor and virtue still played an important role in advancing civilization, because it was precisely from these imaginings that the idea of chivalry arose, and thus ultimately international law arose as well. Of these two factors, the factor of the knight had the greatest driving force for medieval civilization, and no matter how misunderstood this ideal was in reality, it nevertheless remained the basis of international law.” (p. 92, p96)

Of course, many people will think that the modern ideal of peace based on a universal spirit is the nobler one. But compared with the most straightforward and practical “peace” promoted by the ancient Greek Olympics, notions such as universal spirit, one human family, one world, and the like are undoubtedly illusory and hollow. In fact, people are all different and go their own ways; what often demands that people “keep to the same pace” is dictatorship and tyranny. Just think: how many wars, ancient and modern, have been launched in the name of universal spirit? In a blog post, Teacher Wu Fei lamented: “… there was no intention to unite all Greece into one state. Although the aforementioned Lysias praised in his speech the friendliness among the city-states brought about by the Olympics, he never went one step further and turned friendliness into unity.” — But imagine if one really did go one step further, and tried to turn friendliness into unity; one would often have to resort to unfree war. It is precisely by wanting only friendliness and not unity that peace becomes possible.

From the expansion of the Roman Empire to the Crusades of Christianity, were not countless aggressive wars launched in the fervor of “universal spirit”? There were wars among the Greek city-states too, and they were “selfish” wars, and they never thought of uniting into one country. Yet precisely in such circumstances, the Greek city-states were still able to recognize one another, remain friendly, and respect one another. This is the meaning of the Olympic spirit. The Olympics reflect a tendency to sanctify competition, while at the same time gamify it. As mentioned earlier, the ancient Greeks regarded war as a game rather than a utilitarian endeavor; war was no longer something whose purpose was merely to defeat the opponent by any means necessary. The meaning of war was to display one’s own excellence, and therefore it had to be carried out in a fair and mutual-respectful manner. This is just like the way little boys establish friendships—they precisely establish friendship through fighting; fighting one another is the best expression of mutual respect—“We are each independent and therefore each have our differences; we insist on our differences, so we compete with one another; we compete with one another, therefore we respect one another; we compete together, so we are friends.” — This is the logic of the Olympics. A classic advertising slogan from the International Olympic Committee put it even better (we know this passage because it was included in the Li Yang English training materials): “You are my opponent, but you are not my enemy. Your challenge increases my strength and stirs my fighting spirit. Your spirit rewards me. Although my goal is to defeat you, if I win, I will not despise you; on the contrary, I will respect you. Because without you, I cannot discover a better self.”

Because people are not the same, each person has his own likes and dislikes, and the world can never satisfy everything, differences are inevitable and struggle is inevitable too. Moreover, a world without struggle is also uninteresting, especially for boys. But the Olympics conveys this spirit: “We are different, we all want to pursue excellence, we compete fairly, but we respect and are friendly to one another.” What “universal spirit” conveys, however, is: “We are all the same, so we should move toward uniformity, should eliminate differences, should seek unity.” And so the different, the nonconforming, those who are odd, will be looked at askance. Driven by fervent enthusiasm for universalism, people often forget respect and tolerance, and under the banner of “unity,” under the banner of truth and justice, under the banner of “universality,” they eliminate differences, invade the strange, and conquer the strange.

Ancient Greek wars and contests were all about “pursuing excellence”; the winner displayed his excellence and became a “hero,” while the loser, though he might feel humiliated, would more often feel only ashamed because he was not as excellent as his opponent, and he would respect the winner. This is entirely different from any aggressive, conquering, or plundering struggle. Those wars begin with resentment, and what they harvest is also hatred; war is launched out of hate and contempt, and what is ultimately exchanged for it is still hate and contempt. But the spirit of the Olympics tells you: fight because of respect and friendship, and what you ultimately gain is also respect and friendship.

The growth of every great civilization has passed through some age of play, and the spirit of play has often been continued in some form within mature civilizations—for example, the zither, strategy games, calligraphy and painting, and knights in China; bushido in Japan; and the spirit of chivalry in Europe. But only in ancient Greece did play itself, as play, occupy the core of the entire civilization for a long time; the whole civilization coalesced around this “Game,” and that is what allowed those ideas rooted in play to take root, sprout, and flourish in the spiritual world of the Greeks. The power of the Olympics does not lie in what the symbol represents, but in the fact that it is a grand “game.”

August 8, 2008

Main references:

[U.S.] Tony Perrottet: *The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Olympic Games*. Translated by Xue Xue, Beijing Yanshan Publishing House, 2005. (Note: this book would probably be more appropriately translated as *The Naked Olympics*.)

[Netherlands] J. Huizinga: *Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture*, translated by Cheng Qiong, proofread by Wang Zuohong and Chen Weizheng, first edition, Guizhou Publishing Group, Guizhou People’s Publishing House, 1998; second edition, 2007.

[U.S.] Edith Hamilton: *The Greek Way*, translated by Ge Haibin, Huaxia Publishing House, 2008.

[France] Vannier: *The Origins of the Olympic Games — and Sports in Ancient Greece and Rome*, translated by Xu Jiashun, Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2006.