Invention of a Footrace.

An influential figure in the revival of the Olympic Games was Michel Breal, a French classicist and historian, who insisted that the athletic program include an endurance footrace. Although the longest race held in ancient Olympia was about three miles, what Breal had in mind was a race of 40 kilometers, to celebrate the feat of Pheidippides, a Greek soldier, who ran that distance from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek triumph over Persia in 490 B.C. "If the Organizing Committee of the Athens Olympics would be willing to revive the famous run of the Marathon soldier as part of the program of the Games," Breal wrote Coubertin, "I would be glad to offer a prize for this Marathon race." Coubertin presented the idea to the Greeks, who with a deep sense of history and national pride embraced...