Opening an athletic magazine today we are met with diets, supplements, and energy boosters, all designed with excelling at a particular sport in mind. Gone are the days of the well-rounded gentleman athlete that Baron Pierre de Coubertin had in mind when he sought to re-establish the Olympic Games in 1894. The amateurs those games were created for were quickly phased out in 1970’s, when true amateurs no longer could uphold the standard of state-sponsored “amateurs”. What remains are trainers, regimens, and, of course, diets.

In this we are not alone. Ancient Greece, home of the first Olympic Games, followed a similar course. Over the course of a few centuries, well-rounded gentlemen and overall health was replaced by athletes and high performance. Then, as now, food followed professionalism.

Before there were the great sporting competitions there were athletic events as cult expression, performed at weddings and at funerals. The participants of these games were funeral and wedding attendees, and because the texts of this age deal primarily with nobles they appear to have been mostly older aristocratic men, even kings. Presumably the lower castes had similar contests, with lesser prizes and somewhat modified sporting events, excluding such sports such as chariot racing which would have been prohibitively expensive for anyone but the very rich.

As athletes became more professional, so did their training and their diets.

Sporting events open to all citizens, or in the case of some games: all Greeks, regardless of wealth, started cropping up in the 8th century BCE. But, there were not yet athletes, trainers, aside from martial drill sergeants, or special diets. That said, some games, like the Olympics, which began in 776 BCE, are known to at least in later times have demanded of participants to stay in camps for several weeks, eating only the food provided by the Olympic representatives. Whether this was of religious significance, out of fairness, or to avoid performance enhancement, of course, we cannot say.

As the popularity of the games grew more games were instated, some of which came with not only the honour of winning but also a great monetary prizes. Great athletic families emerged. Fathers encouraged sons to carry on the family legacy. The athletes of this era partook in the diet of an active body, but one that was not terribly different from a standard Greek diet. They ate whole grain breads or porridges, dry figs and feta-like cheeses, like most Greeks would have, but the sources are surprisingly silent on the matter of fish, which would certainly have been a part of the standard Greek diet. It was a diet high on natural fibres and calcium, minerals and protein, while being moderately slow in terms of blood sugar, promoting well-rounded good health. And so it continued throughout the 7th century BCE.

Games with prizes of monetary value continued copping up in the 6th century BCE, the most well-known established then being perhaps the Panathenaea. By then, it was possible to make a good living winning games. Former winners made good money for themselves training others and towards the end of the century athleticism was in full swing: specific training regimes, sleep patterns, and diets. One runner had acquired fame on a diet of red meat, and so the diet game started. Some ate copious amounts of red meat, some pork, some ate only goat, and others sought to eat very little and harden the body that way.

Then came the Persian Wars and when that ugliness was all over the fancies of the richer classes, influenced by the new education system which discouraged athleticism as detrimental to both mind and body, turned from athletics once and for all. The prejudice of the “dumb jock” was firmly established, but that did not stop people from watching the games. Plato himself enjoyed the Olympic Games and ventured far to see them and gladly spent time with other sports fans, but he also accused athletes of being a sleepy, useless, and unintelligent lot. Diets became more extreme, training became more extreme, and sleeping became more extreme.

And so it continued for centuries. Physicians proclaimed that athletics could no longer be called “conditioning” of the body, for they were rather destroying it. They were best known for their appetites, these “slaves to [their] own jaws” as Euripides put it. The diet of choice was red meat and wine. One athlete is said to have eaten 1.8 stones meat, 1.8 stones bread and drank 19 pints of wine, whereas another ate a bull single-handed in one day, a third ate a Persian feast for nine all by himself, a fourth won a great eating and drinking contest, and a fifth was so proud of his overeating that he had it inscribed on his grave stone. It is little wonder, perhaps that athletes often died young.

In the Roman period athletes were unionised in guilds. Overeating was a major problem among athletes, which was to be aided with various massages and white meat diets. Many athletes received state pensions for their winnings, which did nothing to improve their reputation for gluttony and useless excess. Nor did it help that many athletes became involved in illegal activities in order to maintain their luxurious lifestyles when money was short. And so, we return to our own time and professional athletics.

About the author: E P Wohlfart is a twenty-something freelance writer with a Classical Archaeology degree, a laptop and a maxed-out library card. Aside from administrating PastPresenters.com, which she started in 2008, she works with several historical publications and is a regular contributor at Suite101.