The Modern Olympics Invented the Marathon

The Paris Olympics’ picturesque marathon course will take runners past many of the city’s highlights—the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre’s glass pyramid, the Eiffel Tower. But it will miss, by miles, a plain one-block street in the 13th arrondissement named Rue Michel-Bréal. That’s a shame, given that Michel Bréal is the reason anyone ever ran a marathon on purpose.

Without a Bréal brainstorm and a letter he wrote in 1894, the number of people who run marathons each year would be zero instead of more than 1 million. A lot of Saturday mornings would be freed up for something other than long runs. Bibs would be reserved for babies. So many nipples would go unchafed.

To the extent that Bréal is remembered today, it’s as a 19th-century scholar of languages and mythology, a leader of French education reform, and the man who coined the word semantics. But he was also an acquaintance of a young man named Pierre du Coubertin, the secretary general of the Union of French Sports Associations, who was active in education reform and, by the early 1890s, planning a revival of the ancient-Greek Olympic Games.

Bréal, three decades Coubertin’s senior, was a leading intellectual of the day, a commander of the French Legion of Honor: the sort of person needed to bring gravitas to the idea of an international festival of athletics. When, in June 1894, Coubertin convened the first meeting of what would become the International Olympic Committee, Bréal sat next to him and gave the opening address—a symbol of the new Olympic Games’ acceptance by the French elite.

A few months later, as early planning for the 1896 Games, in Athens, got under way, Bréal wrote Coubertin a letter that included these lines:

Bréal, who wrote extensively about Greek myth, knew the story of the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.E., at which the Athenians crushed a much larger Persian army that had seemed unstoppable. According to legend, at the battle’s end, a messenger named Pheidippides was sent back to Athens to share word of the victory. He ran the entire distance, roughly 26 miles, delivered his message, and died of exhaustion. (An 1879 poem by Robert Browning had spread the story to many of Bréal’s contemporaries.) Holding a race to echo that run, Bréal thought, would connect the new Games to their ancient heritage.

The idea of running such a long race was strange at the time. Other than the marathon, the 1896 Games featured no runs longer than 1,500 meters—a footrace that took barely four and a half minutes. At the ancient-Greek Games, the longest race held, the dolichos, covered less ground than a Turkey Trot 5K.

Long-distance running simply did not exist as a sport. The late 19th century saw a boom in the sport of pedestrianism, which featured men (and a few women) walking hundreds of miles over days or weeks in a feat of endurance. But walking was not running, and many thought the proposed marathon would end with modern racers collapsing, just like Pheidippides was said to. “A race of this length is, in fact, contrary to all principles of sport and of hygiene,” editorialized the French newspaper L’Univers, assuring readers that the race would probably be shortened to something more reasonable.

But as the 1896 Games approached, excitement built, especially in Greece, about the race’s connection to antiquity. The world’s very first marathon race—a trial run for the upcoming Games to select which Greeks would compete—took place in Greece on March 10, 1896; Charilaos Vasilakos won in three hours and 18 minutes. (As with all events in that first Olympics, only men competed in this one; the women’s marathon was added to the Games in 1984.) At the Games themselves, the marathon was positioned as the event’s climax, “felt by all the Greeks to be the principal event of the games,” an American magazine writer attested. About 100,000 people—the largest crowd of the Games and one of the largest peacetime crowds in human history to that point—jammed into and around the Panathenaic Stadium to await the exhausted runners. And when a Greek water carrier named Spyridon Louis was first to enter the stadium, a new national hero was born. For his victory, Louis received, as promised, a silver cup donated by Michel Bréal. It now sits in the Acropolis Museum.

The marathon race was an immediate success, spawning emulators around the world and transforming long-distance running into a sport. A 1908 Olympics report described an “epidemic of ‘Marathon Races’ which attacked the civilised world from Madison Square Gardens to the Valley of the Nile.”

That rash of imitators also canonized Bréal’s version of the ancient run. There is no contemporary evidence that a man named Pheidippides even did run from Marathon to Athens. The historian Herodotus, writing only a few decades after the battle, attributed an entirely different run to the messenger Pheidippides—from Athens to Sparta to seek Spartan military aid, a distance of about 160 miles. Five hundred years later, Plutarch wrote of a marathonlike run post-battle but said that the runner was named either Thersippus or Eucles.

A few decades after that, the satirist Lucian, who’s known for being loose with his facts, apparently conflated the two stories into one, and Lucian’s was the version that eventually reached Browning and Bréal. But the sketchiness of the origin story was known at the time. The New York Times’ 1896 story on Spyridon Louis’s victory took “the risk of sacrificing a glorious bit of sentiment” by noting that the tale “sounds suspiciously like a combination of [Herodotus and Plutarch] to suit the dramatic occasion.”

But although the race’s ancient origins are murky, its modern (re)birth—and every marathon run in the century-plus since—owes its existence to a Grecophile linguist now buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. If runners want to honor him—and still have the energy—his resting place is just a 10-minute run from the finish line.