There was no Marathon race in antiquity. According to legend, the distance between Marathon and Athens (42km) was ran by Phidippides (or Philippides) who announced the victory of the Athenian army over the Persians in the famous battle of Marathon in 490BC. He uttered the words "We have won" and then collapsed and died. The story was told by later Greek writers of the Roman period, Plutarch and Lucian.
But according to ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, no such thing happened: Phidippides, a long distance runner and messenger ran in a day from Athens to Sparta (a distance of 246 km) to ask for help in the impeding battle. Herodotus says that it was the Athenians that ran the distance from Marathon to Athens following the Persians’ defeat in order to protect the undefended Athens from an imminent Persian attack.
Marathon as Olympic Sport
The person responsible for establishing the long-distance foot race called the Marathon was the French philologist, Michel Bréal. Bréal proposed the introduction of the race to the father of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, who agreed. The Marathon took place at the last day of the first modern Olympics in Athens, on 12 April 1896. The route selected for the race was the one which was supposedly used by the Athenian army.
The distance of the first Marathon was 40 km - not 42.1 km of today. It has been suggested that in the heart of institutionalising “this lethal ancient race” – a race the ancient Greeks would have found excessive – lays the need “not merely to imitate the ancients but to surpass them”.
Spiros Louis wins Marathon
There were 17 athletes that took part in the Marathon of whom 13 Greeks. Among them Edwin Flack from Australia, Gyula Kellner from Hungary, Arthur Blake from the U.S.A., Albin Lermusiaux from France and Spiros Louis from Greece. Bolstered on his way by an orange offered to him by his girlfriend, Spiros Louis, a 24-year-old water-carrier from Marousi, a village at the outskirts of Athens, won the race with a time of 2 hours 58 minutes and 50 seconds.
Recognizing in the face of the sunburnt man entering the Stadium bearing the number 17 their compatriot, the Greek spectators burst out in wild cheers. Crown Prince Constantine and Prince George started running next to Louis on his final lap. The legend of Spiros Louis was already in the making. The Stadium built for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games bears his name.
Marathon and Modern Olympics
Spiros Louis became a legend, his victory symbolic of small nation on the ascent. His victory also fitted well with the myth of the amateur athletics which featured prominently on the international sport arena of the 19th and 20th centuries (Ruprecht).
Sources:
Michael Llewellyn Smith, Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Games, Profile Books 2004
Alfred Erich Senn, Power, Politics and the Olympic Games, Human Kinetics Europe Ltd, 1999.
Louis Ruprecht, "Greek Exercises: The Modern Olympics as Hellenic Appropriation and Reinvention", Thesis Eleven, no. 93, May 2008, pp. 72-87.
Ioannis Pikros, "The Olympics of 1896" in Istoria tou Ellenikou Ethnous (History of the Greek Nation), vol. 14, Athens 1977, p. 93. [in Greek]
Davin Martin and Roger Gynn, "1896 Spiros Louis Victorious for Greece", in The Olympic Marathon, Human Kinetics 2000.
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