Читать книгу The Olympics - Stephen Halliday - Страница 6

After the abolition of the games in 393 AD by Theodosius they disappeared for 1,200 years from the sporting calendar though they were remembered in the classical syllabuses which dominated English schools and universities. An early reference to the revival of the Olympics in England may be found in the career of Robert Dover. He came from a Catholic family in Norfolk and was a student at Cambridge in 1595 at a time when ‘Gog Magog Games’ were being held on the Gog Magog hills outside the city. The games were described, humorously, as ‘Olympik’ at a time when students would have been familiar with the ancient games because the study of the classical world dominated the Cambridge curriculum. Dover was a Catholic sympathizer who left Cambridge without taking a degree to avoid the need to swear the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Elizabeth I’s authority over the English church. He qualified as a barrister at Gray’s Inn and in 1610 he settled at Saintbury in Gloucestershire following his marriage to a local widow. In 1612, at Whitsuntide, he organized the ‘Cotswold Games’ on a hill close to his home near Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire’s beautiful Vale of Evesham. Competitors were summoned to the hill (now known as ‘Dover’s Hill’) by a hunting horn and took part in sports such as horse-racing, wrestling, fencing, throwing the sledge-hammer and shin-kicking! Dover was acutely conscious of the Greek heritage of the games but dismissive of the Greeks of the 17th century, rather unfairly since the Greeks were by that time ruled by the Ottoman Turks. He expressed his contempt in verse:

When Greece frequented active Sport and Playes,

From other men they bore away the Prayse;

Their Commonwealth did flourish; and their Men

Unmatched were for Worth and Honour then.

But when they once those Pastimes did forsake

And unto Drinking did themselves betake,

So base they grew that at this present day

They are not men, but moving lumps of clay.