The People’s Olympics

Wearing togas and running on bare feet, just as it was thousands of years ago in ancient Greece, in June of 2000, I joined a group of people from all over the world to compete in the people’s version of the Olympic Games — the Nemean Games.

As I entered the 120-foot-long vaulted entrance tunnel to the Nemean stadium—the same passageway trod 2,300 years ago by the ancients—I felt the way I always feel in Greece: that the glaring eye of the Greek sun made the steep mountains seem sharper than anywhere else, that it made the marble ruins all around me seem whiter than white, and that it somehow made life feel, well, realer than real. Something deep inside me said that this was where I was meant to be.
That confidence was shaken as I faced a crowd of literally thousands in Nemea’s arena. (As someone who once taught Greek and Latin, I staved off my stage fright by thinking how many times I’d told my students that “arena” was cognate with “harena,” the Latin word for “sand,” which I could feel on the tender soles of my bare feet and between my toes.) The audience had gathered in early June for the Second Modern Nemead, a modest, people’s version of what’s unfolding this month at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia.
Ahead stretched a racetrack, and at its end waved the flags of 45 nations. To my left, on the slopes of the stadium (from the Greek “stadion,” a racetrack), I could see my own family and my best friend, who had come thousands of miles to see whether I had the “arete” (excellence or valor) to outrun 11 other men, all of us wearing spotless white chitons (knee-length togas).
Maybe I should have stopped by the oracle at Delphi first to ask the Pythian priestess the question I suddenly faced: Why was I running in a race against athletes who obviously knew what they were doing and had trained for this event? Here I was, a 52-year-old man who, though he has endeavored over the years to stay in good shape, hates jogging and competitive athletics. I was that guy in school who was inevitably the very last one picked whenever teams were chosen. What on earth was I doing here?
The answer is a long and involved one. It goes back 573 years before Christ, back to when the original inhabitants of Nemea, a town southeast of Athens, instituted a competition very similar to those that already existed in Olympia, Delphi and Isthmia. Eventually, the Panhellenic games—bringing competitors from all over Hellas (the name for Greece in ancient times)—were held regularly in Nemea, as well as in Olympia, Delphi and Isthmia.
“Hostilities were suspended, even if the truce was limited to a few days each year,” explains Dr. Stephen G. Miller, who has been excavating the stadium and sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea for more than 25 years, “and all the Greeks—Spartans and Athenians, Corinthians and Argives, Macedonians and Cretans—gathered in what was the first regular, organized, international sports competition in the history of man.” (They also, Miller has found, took a few moments to inscribe on the walls some of the world’s oldest locker-room graffiti.)
In 1996, the people of modern Nemea, along with Miller, who is a professor of Classical archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, instituted the new Nemean games. The response was so overwhelming that they held a second round of games in June, with 762 participants and a crowd of 8,000. Plans are to hold a third round in 2004—as in antiquity, at the second full moon after the summer solstice.
The aim from the beginning was to make the Modern Nemeads as similar to the original Panhellenic games as possible. Admittedly, no one runs in the buff as the ancients would have, but chitons are donned and feet go bare and the announcer relies on the excellent acoustics of the stadium instead of a PA system. And, as Miller puts it, “Participants are rewarded only by feet made sore from the same stone starting line and the same earth where ancient feet ran more than 2,000 years ago.”
That’s only a slight exaggeration. The winners of the main event—sprinting half a stadion (100 yards or 89 meters) to the finish line—receive a simple palm branch and a ribbon to festoon their heads.
“I’m running a race in the footsteps of Heracles,” said LaGrand Nielsen, who at 93 came all the way from Hemet, California, to compete, for the second time, in Nemea. “If I finish the race, I feel happy with myself.” Finish he did. Not only that, Nielsen went on the next day to finish—by no means in last place—a 7,500-meter (8,250-yard) race that traces the path that Heracles (Hercules) took to Kleonai after he slew the Nemean lion.
“This is an event that makes people happy,” said Theodore Pangalos, Greece’s minister of culture, as he watched from the shade of one of the many olive trees that grow around the stadium. “The idea behind these games is that sports can be practiced in public places with some recognition, but without great expense and advertising and elaborate record-keeping. Simple people of both sexes and all ages can compete and try to win, and if they don’t win, they’re happy to have participated.”
That’s what I kept telling myself as I tried to assume the proper starting stance, only to be whipped on the ankles by the long cane of one of the austere judges wearing black tunics—a historical echo I could have done without.
“Poda para poda,” said the starter, which I easily translated, despite my rusty Greek, as “foot by foot.”
“Ettime!” (Hmmm. Sounds more like Modern Greek. Something about “ready”?)
“Apite!!!” (Yes, from the verb “to go forth” . . . definitely imperative . . . second-person plural. . . .)
I looked up and already a length ahead of me was Roy Woolsey, a slim, handsome American I’d chatted with briefly while donning my chiton. An engineer from Altos Hills, California, he plays racquetball regularly and won in his heat four years earlier. And no wonder. He obviously had translated the Greek before running and gained a distinct advantage.
I dug in and ran like the Nemean lion was after me. Despite the language barrier and my distaste for jogging, I came in second.
Now maybe you expect a noble forbearance in the face of my modest victory. But remember your Homer. Didn’t Achilles drag Hector in the dust behind his chariot in triumphant revenge after he slew him? So take that, all you guys from my hometown who now have enormous beer guts and debilitating gout! You know who you are, you who never picked me to play on your team. Listen up: Second in my heat at the international Second Modern Nemead, no less, cheered on by a throng of thousands. Got that? Made all the sweeter by the embrace of my daughter and wife, and the triumphant congratulations of my high school friend Walter, whom you also slighted.
And when U.S. Olympian Michael Johnson streaks across your TV screen this month in Sydney, bear in mind that he doesn’t have to wear a chiton and has the distinct advantage of a pair of special running shoes (free, I bet).
As I stood very nearly in the winner’s circle, surrounded by a landscape that I love, in sight of ruins whose beauty made my heart skip a beat each time I saw them, I remembered what it was about ancient Greek culture that led me to spend five years of my life studying it: The Greeks lived by a democratically inspired belief that every man possesses the capacity to stand up to his fellow man, irrespective of birth and wealth, and compete for the honor of being the best, the brightest, the strongest.
So what if it took me 35 years to do it? a

David Bailey is executive editor of Sky.

[info box]
Following in Greek Footsteps
The Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games can furnish complete details about June’s Second Modern Nemead—or the Third, planned for June 2004. Info: 30-746-24125 (in Greece), 510-642-4218 or socrates.berkeley.edu/~clscs275/Games%20folder/society.htm. E-mail: nemeaucb@socrates.berkeley.edu.
Ancient Nemea, which is a short drive from Corinth, Mycenae and Epidaurus, is well worth visiting. Besides the stadium and its dramatic entrance tunnel, the site features an excellent museum detailing the sanctuary and the Nemean games. Nearby is the Temple of Zeus, as well as a field packed with other ruins. Info: 30-746-22739 or http://www.nemea.org.—D.B.

Crunch for Lunch

Carl Rothrock, a friend from high school who lives in Eastern North Carolina cue heaven has, as far as I can tell, retired from teaching high school so that he can scout ourt new places to eat barbecue and devote his full attention to what he’s going to put on his jet-black cooker for supper.

The other day, we were e-mailing each other about, you guessed it, barbecue, when he observed “B’s BBQ here in Greenville (751 B’s Barbecue Road, Greenville, N.C.; no phone) has the best chicken I’ve ever eaten, but their BBQ isn’t as good. It’s cooked over charcoal but they remove and throw away the outside brown to have “clean” BBQ. Can you believe it? The best I had there was a few years ago when the main guy had health problems and the fill-in didn’t know the right way to do it and left that nasty old bark on it.”

I love bark, as Carl calls it, or “outside meat” or “brown” as it’s called here in the Piedmont. In Lexington I’ve heard it called “crunch.”

One day I’d stopped at what used to be my favorite place in Lexington, which will go unmentioned because they’ve since switched from hickory to natural gas, and as I always do, asked for a sandwich with “crunch” (You get barbecue slaw on it whether you ask or it for not). The waitress asked me rhetorically, “Do you like crunch.” I allowed as how I loved crunch. “Well, honey, I’m going to fix you up,” she said. My sandwich came to the counter where I was sitting with an admonition, “No peeking,” and when I took my first bite, it did, in fact, crunch — rather loudly. As the grease ran down my chin and onto the napkin I’d wisely tucked into my shirt collar, I realized that she’d added a huge pork rind to my outside meat sandwich. I wonder what “crunch” and “bark” are called in other parts of the world and whether they throw it away or put it in front of avid eaters like myself?

It’s Greek To Me

Professor B. B. Cue says that we may think of barbecue as an American phenomenon and the word may well have sprung from the New World when Spanish explorers adopted the word “barbacoa,” a raised frame used by Arawakan Indians to dry meat, but let’s face it, the patent office hadn’t opened it doors when the first caveman decided that leg of woolly mammoth tasted better barbecued than raw. Like mankind, barbecue got its start on the other side of the Atlantic and I’ve had some mighty good meat cooked low and slow over coals in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria and, especially, in Greece. After I’d come in second in the Olympic Games held for amateurs in Nemea, Greece, I stopped for lunch in a souvlaki stand on the edge of town. Ever since I went to Greece in college, I’d been trying to duplicate the souvlaki I’d eaten on the streets of Athens with no success. And while back in Greece this time around, I was determined to find a street vendor with enough English to share his recipe with me. In Nemea, I met a vendor who had once lived in the U.S. and immediately was able to tell me what I was doing wrong. “It’s American briquet charcoal that’s your problem,” he said. “Feel this,” he said, taking the back of my hand and putting it over the fire. Instantly the smell of burnt hair filled the air and I jerked my hand away. “See if you can’t find some charcoal made from hardwood,” he said. Actually he was talking about hardwood lump charcoal and that did the trick. My recipe was spot-on, he said (Here‘s one that’s pretty close). Use lemon, olive oil and oregano as a marinade, he said. But I did notice that when he took the spits off the fire, he poured oddles of olive oil over the skewered meat and sprinkled them liberally with course salt. European barbecue: You gotta tell me about the best and better yet, where to get it.

Clues to True Cue

“Does the world really need another blog?” That’s what my friends have been asking me when they’ve called to tell me that the fish were biting or that it was Thirsty Thursday at the baseball game — and here I sit, pounding these sauce-stained computer keys.

“Only if it’s good,” I reply, “and has a worthwhile premise.”

To tell the truth, like a lot of journalists, I want to change the world, same as I did when I started out in this crazy business called journalism back in the 1970s. But now my goal is just a little bit less ambitious than it used to be.

So the main business of this blog will be to help people find the best spots on the planet where they can sit down and eat barbecue that’s as good as it gets. I’ve already got a running start with hundreds of recommendations from Sky magazine readers who, over the years, have enthusiastically recommended their favorite cue joints — in almost as many places as Delta flies.

And that’s what I’d like to do here: Host a lively conversation about barbecue and barbecue places that meets a simple rule, one that you hear often if you judge barbecue: Would you drive 75 miles out of your way to eat cue like this again ( especially with gas prices the way they are)?

As I said in the June issue of Sky where I kicked off Cue Confessions: “There’s definitely a whole lot of bad cue out there, and it’s spreading like kudzu. If like me you travel a lot, you find out that there are numerous ways to ruin good meat — too sweet is my pet peeve, but I’ve also found it undercooked, overcooked, flavored with artificial smoke, too mushy, too dry, way too hot. . . . You name it.” More about that in an upcoming post (Although I’d love to hear where there’s barbecue that’s hot enough — a rarity in my book). Let’s start with the essentials of what elements are common in true cue.

I’d begin with meat that’s cooked low and slow over a constant source of heat — can you say traditional? I’d add that cue is better if the fat hits the fire, imbuing the meat with that savory something that makes anything grilled better. And I think it needs a sauce, something to make the tongue sizzle just a little bit, whether from cayenne, habaneros, chipotle or plain old salt and black pepper. What am I missing?

And let’s get the cue queue going. Where are some places with an address and phone number where you can get characteristic, traditional barbecue at its most elemental?