The 2024 Summer Olympic Games begin at 9 a.m. New Haven time, when Argentina, Morocco, Spain and Uzbekistan take to the soccer fields of Paris. NBCUniversal, which holds the domestic broadcast rights, has divvied up TV coverage among a handful of channels, while Peacock, the company’s web-based streaming service, is going all-in, not just with a promise to capture “Every Moment. Every Medal” but also to do it live. Local sports bars—The Cannon, The Trinity and, for events airing on basic NBC, Archie Moore’s—can’t make quite the same promise, though they can offer fizzy and fried refreshments and company to watch with.
Most of them will likely be rooting for Team USA. But there’s one nation that deserves a quadrennial nod from all of us, no matter who we’re cheering for: Greece.
At first glance, the birthplace of both the ancient and modern Olympics has won surprisingly few summer golds: 35 total, ranking 29th all-time, padded by 10 from the first modern Games in 1896, when Greece hosted and competed against just 13 other nations. That tally becomes more impressive, however, when you consider Greece’s 90th-place population ranking. And if you were only to count Greece’s golds since 1992, while letting everyone else count from 1896, the 90th-sized Greeks would still rank 38th all-time.
In its impact on New Haven, Greece also punches above its weight class. Ancient Greece was the progenitor of higher education, which, especially through Yale, has ineffably shaped the city and its residents. Many local collegians owe a further debt to Greek food, their work sessions fueled and hangovers eased by Alpha Delta’s gyros, Yorkside’s souvlaki platters and Mamoun’s stuffed grape leaves, and to “Greek life,” which endures at Quinnipiac, Southern, UNH and, for more than two centuries, Yale. From 15 centuries past, a prominent mosaic in the Yale University Art Gallery speaks to us through a Greek inscription, while Greek-inspired columns lend beauty and gravity to civic and historical sites—the County Courthouse, the US Courthouse, Ives Main Library, the old Connecticut Savings Bank building. American-style diners from the Parthenon in Branford to the Acropolis in Hamden are actually run by Greek Americans, and the upcoming ODYSSEY festival, an annual Labor Day Weekend celebration of Greek culture in Orange, hopes to once more win the gold medal of our hearts.
It should be noted that New Haven has given its own gifts to Greece. In the 1820s, a local movement notable enough to get a whole paragraph in Rollin Osterweis’s Three Centuries of New Haven (1953) sprouted up to support Greece’s war for independence from the Ottoman Empire. (The effort was led in part by historic New Haveners Noah Webster, Roger Sherman Baldwin and David C. DeForest, a “merchant, prince of privateers, and diplomat” who, according to a 1947 biography, had already “occupie[d] a leading place” in various South American independence movements.) More recently, a team working under the auspices of the Yale Peabody Museum has applied considerable scholarship to archaeological sites outside Delphi, and just last year, Yale University Press published What the Greeks Did For Us, a book honoring the gifts ancient Greece keeps giving to the world today, including via its invention of the stadium.
As these Olympics unfold; as I gobble up this spectacle invented by Greeks featuring several sports invented by Greeks in facilities invented by Greeks; I’ll be rooting for Team USA. But I won’t be surprised to find myself cheering, too, for Greece.
Written by Dan Mims. Image features the Greek flag flying over Hozoviotissa Monastery in Amorgos, Greece (Shutterstock).
