Forget global unity and pristine stadiums. The original Olympic Games were funerary rites turned religious spectacle, rooted in a founding myth where Pelops wins a bride by sabotaging a king's chariot with wax axle pins. This episode strips away the modern mythology to examine Olympia as a ghost town that filled every four years with pilgrims, flies, heat and the smoke of a hundred sacrificed oxen, where pushing the body to its limit was a form of prayer to Zeus.

We trace the events from a single 192-meter sprint to the hoplitodromos run in armor, the shift to competing naked after Orsippus in 720 BC, head-hunting boxers, and the pankration death of Arrhichion, who was crowned champion as a corpse. Then we turn to the politics: Sotades bought by Ephesus, the Zanes statues funded by bribery fines, Nero's rigged ten-horse chariot race in 67 A ...