06 Apr 1896
15 Apr 1896
Country of the host city
Athens selected by the IOC
The strands of the modern Olympics came together at a meeting in Paris' Sorbonne in 1894. German Johann Guts Mults founded modern gymnastics at he end of the 19th Century. Britain's Dr William Penny Brooks founded the Much Wenlock Olympic Society in 1850. And in Greece, Major Evangelis Zappas organised a Pan Hellenic sports festival in 1859.
But it took a French aristocrat, Pierre de Fredi, Baron de Coubertin, to put together a cohesive plan to revive the sporting competition first seen in Olympia in Ancient Greece. The International Olympic Committee was born at the Sorbonne cnference and planned Games every four years. From the outset, water sports were to be included: rowing, sailing and swimming.
But sailing was absent from the Athens Games of 1896, one of only two occasions this occurred.