Stamata Revithi
The 1896 Olympic Games were the first held in the Modern era and the most important international multi-sport event Greece had ever hosted. The rules of the Games generally excluded women from competition. Influenced by both his times—in the Victorian era women were considered to be inferior to men—and his admiration for the ancient Olympic Games, when only men were allowed to participate in the events, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the visionary of the modern Olympic Games, was not in favour of women's participation in the Olympic Games or in sports generally. He believed that a woman's greatest achievement would be to encourage her sons to be distinguished in sports and to applaud a man's effort.
Ancient Olympic Games
The Olympic games were held to be one of the two central rituals in ancient Greece, the other being the much older religious festival, the Eleusinian Mysteries. The games first started in Olympia, Greece, in a sanctuary site for the Greek deities near the towns of Elis and Pisa (both in Elis on the peninsula of Peloponnesos). The Sanctuary of Zeus in Olympia housed a statue in ivory and gold of Zeus that had been sculpted by Phidias circa 445 BC. This statue was one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. By the time of the Classical Greek culture, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the games were restricted to male participants.