Our first reader suggestion: AT pointed us to a Washington Post article about the first time Athens hosted Games, 700 B.C.

It includes such lines as:

• Back in the old days, the athletes competed buck naked, except for a coating of olive oil — and they looked great.
  
• In the old days, we stuck to your basic tried-and-true sports: your running, your wrestling, your chariot racing, your pankration. What? You never heard of pankration? It was the king of combat sports — a combination of boxing, wrestling, mugging and a good old-fashioned butt-kicking.
  
• If you started gouging somebody’s eyes out, the judges would step in and beat you with sticks. Judges didn’t pussyfoot around in those days.
  
• “In terms of audience satisfaction, our own revived Olympic games can hardly compare — unless they were to be combined with Carnival in Rio, Easter Mass at the Vatican, and a tour of Universal Studios,” which is from a new book by historian Tony Perrottet called “The Naked Olympics.”

There’s also some semi-useful information, like Constantine’s ushering in of Christianity pretty much ushered out the rather pagan Olympics and the torch run was not something ancient Greeks did.

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