This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything

here on this show, including your stories, send them to Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your

stories, send them to our American Stories.com.

They're some of our favorites.

And today, we have the story of the 1904 Olympics.

Susan Brownell, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is an expert

in Olympic Games and Olympic history. She brings us the story.

I became interested in the Olympics as an athlete, actually. I mean, from the time I was quite young, I just really wanted to compete in the Olympic Games.

And one thing led to another. I got a full athletic scholarship to college, and I competed

at the EVE level in track and field.

But I just wasn't good enough to make an Olympic team.

I competed in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic trials.

My best finished was seventh.

But I was lucky because I was able to convert it into an academic career.

The first Olympic Games had been held in Greece, in Athens, and so that had really stamped

the character of the early Olympic Games, which were connected with Western civilization,

which actually was a sort of fairly new concept at that time.

It was a concept that was emerging as Europe tried to figure out what it had in common versus the rest of the world.

And so the games were linked with this glorious tradition going all the way back to classical Greece,

which was shared by every culturally Western person in the world, supposedly.

...