Daily quote by Olympic Games

• War is in the games children play – capture the flag or the fort – and one of the most popular video games of 2018 in the United States was Call of Duty, based on the Second World War. The crowds who go to sporting events sometimes treat them as battles with the other team as the enemy. In Italy those who are known as Ultra fans arrive at football matches in highly organised groups with a firm hierarchy of command. They wear uniforms and give themselves names such as Commandos, Guerrillas and, much to the dismay of many of their fellow Italians, some borrowed from the partisan bands of the Second World War. They come to do battle with supporters of the rival team more than to watch the match. The modern Olympics were meant to build international fellowship but from almost their first moment they mirrored competition between the different nations. The games were not war but they took on many of its attributes, with the awarding of medals, the playing of national anthems and teams in uniforms marching in unison behind their national flags. Hitler and Goebbels famously envisaged the 1936 Berlin Olympics as key in their campaign to show the superiority of the German people and, during the Cold War, tallies of medals were read as showing the superiority of one side over the other.
  • Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020), p. 6
• The last of the ancient Olympic Games was held in A.D. 393. In the following year the edict of the emperor Theodosius prohibited the holding of the Games.
  • History of the Olympic Games, by Xenophon L. Messinesi