The Games come back

In April 1896, Athens lights the first modern Olympic Games. Fourteen nations send a few hundred athletes. There is no torch relay yet, no billion-dollar broadcast, no superstar village. There is a marble stadium, a French educator’s idea, and a country that wants the ancient name back.

Pierre de Coubertin had spent years arguing that sport could make better citizens. The first program is a mix of track, gymnastics, fencing, swimming in the Bay of Zea, and a marathon that invents its own legend when Spiridon Louis, a water-carrier, wins for Greece.

Everything that follows — five rings, boycotts, billion-dollar bids, and a teenager from Kingston or Kingston-upon-Thames dreaming of a final — hangs on this reunion. The Games become the one calendar every sport still orbits.