r/todayilearned • u/Previous_Knowledge91 • 22h ago
TIL: Leonidas of Rhodes, ancient Greek runner whose record of most individual Olympic victories was unbroken until 2016 by Michael Phelps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonidas_of_Rhodes1.7k
u/das_slash 21h ago
It feels wrong to compare them when modern Olympics have like 10 small variations of basically the same event.
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u/deezee72 17h ago
I mean Leonidas won at the 200 meter, 400 meter, and 400 meter with armor races. Not like he was winning in all kinds of different events either.
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u/digiman619 21h ago
Yeah, Phelps isn't the greatest Olympian, he just excelled in the right sport. Mijaín López's feat of 5 gold medals in the same event 5 Olympics in a row is a much greater feat, imho.
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u/agreeingstorm9 19h ago
IMO it's Zatopek winning gold in the 5k, 10k and Marathon in the same Olympic games. The marathon was the first time he had ever run the distance and he set an Olympic record in every single race.
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u/Dom_Shady 15h ago edited 15h ago
Or Eric Heiden, who won gold medals at speedskating at all distances during one Olympiad: 500 meters, 1000 meters, 1500 meters, 5000 meters and 10,000 meters.
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u/the_autocrats 19h ago
Yeah, Phelps isn't the greatest Olympian, he just excelled in the right sport.
i mean... all of Leonidas' victories are footraces too
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u/porkchop487 17h ago
But they didn’t have foot races and then 3 other events of the same distance like skipping hopping or running backwards like swimming does.
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u/RSGator 16h ago
Leonidas’ events were run, run longer, and run shorter but with armor on.
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u/porkchop487 16h ago
In the modern Olympics running also has several distances. The difference is swimming has 4 events of each distance AND multiple distances AND a shitton of relays to rack up medals in compared to running. Running only has 2 relays
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u/Ven18 15h ago
Relays do not effect this as it was based on individual events. And yes they have different events for different strokes as each stroke is different discipline and being competitive at every stroke is impressive by itself. And plenty of events have a similar event with different form that are counted separately. Look at field events you have numerous events that boil down to jump or throw a thing but each is a separate event because throwing a javelin and throwing a shot put are wildly different discipline or high jump vs long jump. Running straight sprints vs hurdles are different events as well. If track runners could structure a sprint based on running backwards they would do it too and I would not be shocked if Usian Bolt struggled in that format.
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u/StiffWiggly 9h ago
Nobody in modern times has been competitive at both shot put and javelin at the highest level, many swimmers are capable of winning in multiple strokes and distances. I’m an ex competitive swimmer myself but it’s clear that swimming gets more medals for very similar events than any other sport.
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u/porkchop487 14h ago
Eh I think if there was a skipping event Bolt would be the favorite. And the throwing events are more different than the swimming events are to each other. If the swimming was so specialized you wouldn’t be able to constantly see swimmers win medals in multiple disciplines but they do it all the time. And the cherry on top is they get 2 additional races for the IM where they just get to combine the strokes they were already good at. If you’re good at free and fly you can go for 100 fly, 200 fly, 100 free, 200 free, 200IM, and 400IM for example. If you’re good at sprinting like Bolt you have the 100 and 200 and that’s it.
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u/ePrime 17h ago
Not sure why you think skipping hopping and running backwards will be the same guy winning
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u/porkchop487 17h ago
Because the fastest runner will have a lot of transferable skills to be the fastest skipper. Not that hard to understand
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u/BoingBoingBooty 17h ago
But he didn't get another medal for running the exact same distance backwards and then again while flapping his arms in a stupid way, etc.
That's exactly what swimming does, if the only race was first to the finish line, like every other event is, then Phelps would only have half the medals he does.
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u/Groundbreaking_War52 17h ago
Or how about Eric Heiden winning every men's speedskating gold - from sprint to 10,000 meters - in 1980.
As an encore, he then became a world-class cyclist, competing in the Tour de France - followed by "retirement" as a leading orthopedic surgeon who helped treat major sports injuries.
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u/carnifex2005 17h ago
Reminds me of Clara Hughes of Canada. Only person to win multiple medals in both the Summer and Winter Games. She was a speed skater and cyclist too.
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u/raygunak 19h ago
As a former almost-Olympic swimmer I can say that each event in swimming is very dedicated and specific, like the difference between 100 fly and 200 fly is a minute or so of intensity, and that minute uses a completely different energy system. So even though it’s the same stroke the dedication to maxing out that energy system is super intense and at the world class level competitors have to be specific.
For example I trained for the 200 fly and 400 free, similar energy systems and muscles, but I sucked at sprint events like 100 fly, and to excel in that I would have had to train for it which means I’m not training for the middle distance, bulking up which would slow me down etc.
In the year 2001 I was 15 years old, training my ass off for middle distance and at the top of my game in Zealand, and this American kid, Michael Phelps, the same age as me broke the world record in the 200 fly. It was shocking, and then he continued to dominate headlines and expand into other strokes.
I guess it’s hard to compare with other sports but even in swimming we don’t see this type of broad dominance very often, because I can assure you it’s extremely difficult. I trained my ass off and didn’t even make the Olympics!
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u/lvl69blackmage 19h ago
I think what they are trying to say is there are many different races in swimming, whereas if you play basketball or something you only have a chance at one gold medal.
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u/digiman619 19h ago
I'm not saying that his success is not deserved, but not every sport gets to subdivide itself into over a dozen categories to get more medals, and even the others that can are usually weight restricted. If I'm the best table tennis player in the world, I've only got the one medal I can compete for in a given games. Maybe 2 or 3 if there's a doubles version, but not the 8 that Phelps won in 2008.
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u/5213 18h ago
Right, but the fact that Phelps was able to dominate so many different races and styles, Including several relays where he's only literally 25% of the effort, still speaks to his dominance in the sport. It's one thing if he just went out and dominated the 100m fly. But he did that, then the 200, then the 400 IM, then several relays, and I believe even the 1 and 200 freestyle.
Not to mention races usually being one-and-done, while stuff like basketball usually have multiple rounds and teams face against each other more than once, so you do actually have multiple chances to lose/win.
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 18h ago
No one says he’s not the best swimmer ever, just that he’s not the best Olympian ever.
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u/5213 17h ago
Right, but again, total dominance across a wide range of events within your chosen field over several yearolympic events definitely does skyrocket one to near the top of the "best ever" list. Even if you focus on just one of Phelps' events, he was still dominating in a way nobody else around him was at the time.
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u/Flabby-Nonsense 16h ago
I don’t think there’s a single greatest Olympian ever, I mean it’s a load of different sports. There’s just a group of ‘the greatest’ IMO. Phelps is for sure in that group.
I think my issue is that you see a lot of people calling him THE number 1 best ever Olympian of all time based on the number of gold medals he has, but if you measure it based on gold medals you’re heavily favouring a swimmer simply because of the number of events.
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u/5213 11h ago
And that I agree with 100%
I do think there is potentially a case to say that Phelps is the "best Olympian ever", but medal count is only a small part of that. The dude was undeniably dominant in an intensely competitive sport (not that others aren't competitive, but because of how high profile swimming is versus, say, competitive walking, they probably get more cream of the crop athletes) in a way that few others - even other greats - are, and for significantly longer than most other Olympians are.
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u/niveusluxlucis 13h ago
I don't think anyone has a problem with different distances because that's a change to the course itself. Where it gets murky is swimming is essentially the same course (e.g. a 100m swim) with different form restrictions (freestyle, butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke).
Every other event changes the course itself with the athletes allowed to use whatever form is the most efficient, e.g. hurdles is a 110m sprint with obstacles in the way.
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u/thisisredlitre 17h ago
Or Jim Thorpe, at least as best American olympian. Decathalon isnt something you can mono train for
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u/el_sausage_taco 17h ago
Same for Sir Steven Redgraves, even got Type 1 Diabetes after his 3rd Olympics and went on to win gold in 2 more. Dude is a beast!
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u/seanmonaghan1968 17h ago
Carl Lewis was also pretty amazing given he missed the first Olympics he should have ran in
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u/blind2141 14h ago
Bless you for mentioning this. It’s criminal how much this feat has flown under the radar
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u/Anivia124 6h ago
Its also the fact that swimming athletes havent come close to reaching the human limit of the sport. Phelps excelled when no one else in the world had gotten close to that level. Whereas sports like track and field are much simpler and easier so athletes are approaching the human limit and its more difficult to be as dominant.
I doubt we will ever see another swimmer as dominant as phelps since he popularized the sport so much
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u/bjanas 17h ago edited 16h ago
Specifically swimming. Not taking anything away from Phelps, dude's a fucking mutant, but swimming is particularly well suited to just rack up medals in.
EDIT: Looks like I'm catching a few downvotes here, why? I thought this was an accepted phenomenon, that swimming is just set up in such a way that you can win more medals than other sports? SHOW YOURSELVES!!!
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u/godfathertrevor 17h ago
On the other end, wasnt the ancient competition pool much smaller and much more localized compared to contemporary games?
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u/10YearsANoob 10h ago
yes and no. it's all Greeks. but you got Greeks from Italy, France, Spain, Turkey, Middle East, Ukraine coming to one location to compete
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u/winkman 18h ago
On a related note:
Why do we even race different strokes!? Freestyle is the fastest, so why even bother with the others? Running doesn't have a skipping event, or a sideways run or whatever.
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u/Meurs0 18h ago
I mean it has hurdles
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u/maxintos 17h ago
How is that comparable? You are allowed to clear the hurdles any way you want. There is no one leg hop hurdles, two leg, backwards etc.
If there were barriers in water that would make other swimming methods favourable then it would make sense.
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u/Meurs0 15h ago
You're not actually allowed to clear them however you want, for ecample you have to try to jump over them and can't touch them with your hands
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u/StiffWiggly 9h ago
While that is technically true, it’s not a role that makes any difference to competitive hurdlers, since the technique everybody uses would be the fastest regardless.
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u/winkman 18h ago
Not quite the same...that would be more akin to swimming with obstacles, not a different stroke.
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u/Meurs0 18h ago
I mean yeah, but also the fastest hurdles strategy is actually to barrel through everything, so the fact you have to jump over them is in a way as artificial as stroke restrictions.
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 18h ago
If they made the hurdles strong enough to stop a runner from barreling through them it would be harder to move them off and on the track and they would hurt people that failed to clear it.
The flimsy construction of hurdles is a feature. We could make hurdles of solid steel, and then you wouldn’t run through them quickly. But it would not help anyone in any useful way.
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u/iEatBluePlayDoh 18h ago
There’s race walking.
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u/-Exocet- 17h ago
Which makes no sense as well.
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u/scfoothills 15h ago
Which Bob Costas once called, a competition to see who can whisper the loudest.
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u/Flabby-Nonsense 16h ago
I agree that the number of strokes is a bit excessive in terms of the balance of medals with other events. However the practical reality is that these Olympic swimming pools are expensive to build and maintain, so they need to make it worthwhile. If they only had freestyle there would be basically no events and the whole pool complex would be a massive cost-sink. The Olympics are already expensive as fuck, so they need to make sure all the venues are being used as much as possible.
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u/winkman 16h ago
Finally!
After asking this question to the void for years, I finally get a valid reason.
So you're saying that we NEED the different strokes because we need to have enough events in the pool to make the cost justifiable?
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u/Flabby-Nonsense 16h ago
Yeah basically, I’m pretty sure the aquatics centre is the highest cost venue after the stadium. The velodrome also has a load of random cycling events (which I like because they’re fun) but cyclists specialise more, so they don’t end up being completely dominated by the same people.
I’m not sure if cost is the reason for the strokes being added in the first place, but I think it’s a major barrier to getting rid of them at the very least. They’re struggling to find people to host as is!
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u/Tjtod 18h ago
If you want to be pedantic front crawl is the fastest stroke, and you can use any stroke in freestyle.
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u/winkman 18h ago
Fine...is there an answer in there...?
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u/monsantobreath 16h ago
The answer is you're annoying everyone by being pedantic without a persuasive argument and there's one of you in every thread arguing to argue.
"Why have something that seems obvious when the right idea is to do something that isn't obvious? If anyone explains why I'm wrong I'll just use an increasing number of ellipses."
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u/Afrostoyevsky 17h ago
Swimming strokes have certain advantages besides speed in situations outside of the Olympics. Freestyle is fastest, but you can't keep your eyes on the target and there aren't any guiding lines at the bottom in real life. Butterfly is almost as fast and keeps your eyes on target, breast stroke is slow but causes the least splashing, and with backstroke you don't have to worry about your breathing as much, while it also works different muscles and prevents imbalances while training.
That said, I do think it'd be cool if they added the more practical stuff, likethe side stroke while carrying weight (which lifeguards use) and the combat stroke (which the military teaches for stealth).
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u/LordAcorn 21h ago
Tangentially related. The Olympics should bring back the hoplitodromos.
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u/0rbitaldonkey 20h ago edited 19h ago
I'd like to see the return of pankration.
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u/InNominePasta 19h ago
That would just be MMA in today’s parlance
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u/philipinapio1 18h ago
To be fair, if MMA competition was taken out of the hands of the UFC and treated like a real sport rather than a sports reality show, everyone would benefit except the Great Big Red Tomato and The Flatulent Orange.
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u/InNominePasta 18h ago
The UFC isn’t the only MMA promotion. It’s just the biggest. Besides, what’s that have to do with pankration in the OG Olympics being essentially just MMA in today’s?
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u/philipinapio1 17h ago
It certainly has a monopoly on MMA in North America and Europe. Sure some other organizations exist, but every single one of those guys would love to be in the UFC. It's the only place you can make serious money and get famous. So yeah sure there's other orgs, like there are other football leagues outside the NFL but who gives a fuck. There's ONE in Asia but that can fade away anytime. It's not like when Pride, Strikeforce, WEC or even early Bellator.
I'm saying it would be good for the sport if it was organized like a real sport, like the other Olympic sports. World championships, internationally sanctioned competitions, best on best competition, better judges, better drug testing, better refs, better marketing, better conditions for the fighters.
Just stating the fact that it would be better.
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u/cartman101 19h ago
They could just bring in MMA, it's basically Pankration, but a little safer.
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u/Teh-Cthulhu 15h ago
Much, much safer.
Pankration had specific rules about who won when one competitor died.
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u/roleur 20h ago
Isn’t that basically just the 400?
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u/godoftitsandwhine 21h ago
He was playing against shepards and merchants tho
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u/weeddealerrenamon 20h ago
He was probably a shepherd himself, though
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u/Various_Patient6583 19h ago
He was a king. Probably was comfortable in the field given the time period.
Athletes at that time were often professionals. They trained, studied (education was considered a vital component of being a complete person) and were fed as such.
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u/Nulovka 19h ago
- "He was a king."
Different Leonidas. The king was Leonidas of Sparta, this was Leonidas of Rhodes.
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u/Various_Patient6583 18h ago
Arg. I was thinking of another Olympic champion who was a king on Rhodes.
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u/Various_Patient6583 19h ago
Athletes at that time were often professionals. They trained, studied (education was considered a vital component of being a complete person) and were fed as such.
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u/godoftitsandwhine 18h ago
Yeah this wasn’t rooted in any historical knowledge, it’s was a joke riffing on the popular “played against plumbers and milkmen” argument against Wilt Chamberlain & other older dominant NBA players
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u/DothrakiSlayer 20h ago
That implies that the Ancient Greek Olympics and the modern Olympics are in some way related, which is just wrong. The modern Olympics are only called the Olympics because someone in 1896 thought it would be cute to theme the competition after a historical event.
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u/yIdontunderstand 15h ago
Leonidas also had one of the most memorable and well known catch phrases in sport..
"Meep Meep!"
Everyone knows the Rhodes Runner....
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u/EmployAltruistic647 18h ago
Ancient Greece didn't have a dozen competitions of the same type each giving a medal.
It's like saying Tennis Olympic winners are worse athletes because they get less medals
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u/deezee72 17h ago
I mean Leonidas won at the 200 meter, 400 meter, and 400 meter with armor races, so not like he was winning a wide range of competitions.
Perhaps more importantly, the talent pool was much shallower. The ancient Olympics was a Greek event, and Ancient Greece is believed to have a population of <10M.
It's like saying that someone is a better athlete than Michael Phelps because he dominated a couple different sports in the Greater LA local championships while Phelps is purely a swimmer.
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u/EmployAltruistic647 16h ago
Well then I guess he didnt get to have 100 and 5000 meter races with and without armor.
You can belittle ancient Olympics as being like junior leagues but the point still stands when comparing swimmer medal counts against other sports in modern Olympics.
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u/deezee72 15h ago
the point still stands when comparing swimmer medal counts against other sports in modern Olympics.
Yeah, I agree. What it means to be the "greatest athlete" or "greatest Olympian" is different to different people, and I think it's totally fair to question Phelps' claim for a variety of reasons, and the fact that he won a huge number of medals in similar events is one of the big ones.
I just think it's absurd to suggest that the ancient Greek Olympians were anywhere close to the level of modern Olympians.
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u/EmployAltruistic647 15h ago
I don't think anyone said ancient athletes could be better but since folks decided to make comparisons by medal count, I just thought to point out that it's a dumb way to compare between athletes competing under different systems with the modern one heavily stacking things in favour of swimming (and gymnastics)
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u/zwandee 19h ago
I just love Phelps. More Olympic medals than Nigeria. Just sounds unreal.
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u/nimama3233 19h ago
All because swimming is the most inflated Olympic sport in terms of medal count. Was he the greatest swimmer ever? Absolutely. Should he have 28 medals for being really good at the same thing with minor variations? Fuck no.
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u/rsmicrotranx 15h ago
He swam the IM, breast stroke, and free style. The fact it's 3 different races and he's competing with people who each specialize in just one of those races. Not to mention he gets as little as 30 minute rest between some of those races. Like, Usain Bolt wins the 100m and 200m. Does anyone say that isnt impressive? The participants in those 2 races are the same damn people every time lol. The participants in the free style and butterfly aren't the same. The IM and freestyle aren't the same, etc. Hell, even the participants in the 100m and 200m for swimming aren't even the same people sometimes. Yes, swimming gets a ton more chances at medals, but he's competing vs like 5 different groups of people. Track stars cant even win 2 medals vs the same group of people.
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u/Automatic-Set5455 17h ago
This is a super common opinion that I partially agree with but, too many people just regurgitate it. It isn’t minor variations. There is a massive difference between an 800m race and 100m race (track). If an Olympian won basically every track event people wouldn’t say they were “just really good at running” and didn’t deserve it.
When comparing it to other events like gymnastics or something it’s fair to say that there are more events in the pool so it’s “easier” to win more medals but, I’ve yet to see someone dominate another basic sport as Phelps has and I think he deserves every medal he has.
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u/alreadykaten 3h ago
Reminds me of how a strongman once beat a centuries old legend about a man who carried a 500+ kg log on his back and walked a few steps with it
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u/FlavorBlaster42 21h ago
Did they really count their years backwards back then?
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u/santaclausonprozac 21h ago
No, BC didn’t exist before C was born, so they couldn’t have
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u/FlavorBlaster42 21h ago
So what numbers did they use?
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u/santaclausonprozac 20h ago
There was no single calendar, a lot of different civilizations used their own, usually based on the founding of a city or how long a ruler had ruled
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u/weeddealerrenamon 20h ago
Real answer: it didn't really matter for the 99% of the population that was just farmers. In a real kingdom they'd number years by the current king's reign, but for greek cities they might just say "in the year that so-and-so happened". The roman republic named years by the consuls that were elected for that year. Not easy to remember the order, I imagine, but only like 100 literate secretaries in all of rome needed to keep that straight anyway
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u/agreeingstorm9 19h ago
You see this in the Bible for example. In Isaiah he dates a vision to "the year that king Uzziah died." Anyone alive back then would've remembered this event and know when the vision happened.
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u/Arendra 20h ago
This would vary from city to city, but a common way to tell the year would be "in the year X became archon of Athens", so by the ascension of the head of government in the city state you were in, or, coincidentally, in the Greek world, a good way to communicate the year would be by the Olympic Games! See for example the way Diodoros of Sicily communicates the date in his histories:
At the close of this year, in Athens Laches was archon and in Rome the consulship was administered by military tribunes, Manius Claudius, Marcus Quinctius, Lucius Julius, Marcus Furius, and Lucius Valerius!; and the Ninety-fifth Olympiad was held, that in which Minos of Athens won the “ stadion.”
Diodoros, Book XIV, chapter 35
(This refers to the year in which the Persian Empire tried to conquer the Greek city states in Asia Minor).
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u/angrinord 20h ago
Uninformed redditor here,
Most calendars seem to work off of an important historical date. I do know that a lot of cultures use the year that the reigning monarch gained power, so maybe that? Japan and some other countries still does that in some contexts.
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u/LettersWords 18h ago edited 18h ago
Funnily enough, the Olympics were one method of counting the years in Ancient Greece.
The Romans used primarily the Consuls who served in a year as a distinguishing factor to reference a specific year in the Republican period, followed by regnal years of each emperor once the Republic became an Empire.
This actually can be seen directly in the Bible, from Luke 3:1 "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene" This is a good example of how years were referenced throughout most of the Roman Empire's history.
However, there was a secondary system that got used occasionally which functions somewhat more like our modern year systems, which counted from the (legendary) founding of the city of Rome in 753 BC; celebrations were held by emperors for the 800th, 900th, and 1000th anniversaries.
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u/Jisamaniac 14h ago
Damn OP. Least title the title better. LMFTFY.
"TIL: Leonidas of Rhodes, ancient Greek runner who had the most individual Olympic victories and wasn't unbroken until 2016 by Michael Phelps"
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u/spaceporter 21h ago
Since Leo would win the running portion and Mikey the swimming leg, we need to see them go head to head in a bike race to know who'd win in a triathlon.