The earliest celebration of the ancient Olympic Games of which there is a certain record is that of July 776 BC, when Coroibos , a cook from Elis, won the foot race, though their origin dates from perhaps as early as c. 1370 BC. The ancient Games were terminated by an order issued in AD393 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I. Information from Archives (e.g. 1998). Submitted for use in Scholastic’s Modern Marvels.
The first use of gender testing for athletes was in 1968 at the X Winter Olympics held in Grenoble, France.
The first time gold medals were awarded to Olympic champions was during the 1904 Olympic Games held in St. Louis, USA. Prior to this, gold had been considered too expensive, so the winner of an event had received a silver medal and the runner-up a bronze, while there was no medal at all for third place. The last time gold medals were made from solid gold was at the Stockholm Games in 1912, following which the medals were cast in silver and coated in 6
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The 1908 Games had originally been awarded to Rome, but when it became clear that the Italian capital would not be capable of hosting the competition due to the recent eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the venue was hastily switched to London. On 27 April 1908, the Games opened with the first ever Parade of Nations, which saw the athletes of each nation enter the Olympic Stadium together behind their national flags
The first time that Women’s Boxing has been in included in the Summer Olympic Games programme is at the 2012 Games held in London, UK. Female athletes will compete at three weights, Flyweight (48-51kg), Lightweight (56-60kg) and Middleweight (69-75kg).
The first use of starting blocks for Summer Olympic track events was in 1948 in London. Previously, athletes dug holes in the track in order to gain footholds prior to starting sprint events.
The first time that artificial snow was used at an Olympics was in 1980 at the XIII Winter games held in Lake Placid, New York, USA. Machines were used to produce the snow, ensuring the games took place during an exceptionally dry winter in Lake Placid.
On 20 July 1936, the Greek athlete Konstantin Kondylis became the first ever Olympic torch bearer when he set off on the first leg of the journey from Olympia (Greece), where the original Olympics were born, to Berlin, Germany, where the 1936 Games were to be held. The 3,187 km (1,980 mi) journey was undertaken by a total of 3,331 runners, who each covered a distance of around 1 km (0.62 mi). The torch itself was designed to stay alight in all weathers, using highly
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Introduced at the 1964 Tokyo Games, volleyball was the first Olympic team sport for female athletes. The round-robin event was won comfortably by the Japanese team, who lost just one set in the course of the competition and beat the silver medal-winning Soviet Union in straight sets.
The Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was among the first to observe that the steady, predictable rate of a pendulum’s swing made it ideal for use in timekeeping. The first ever fully operational clock powered by a pendulum was built in 1656 by Dutch horologist Christiaan Huygens (1629–95). Initially accurate to within a minute per day, later refinements brought this down to around 10 seconds. By the end of the century, pendulum clocks were keeping time to within 0.5 seconds per day – accurate enough
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