Elis, the ancient Greek city-state in the western Peloponnese that organized the Olympic Games at Olympia, also produced more Olympic champions than any other city-state, according to historical records. Sparta comes second and Athens third among the cities whose victors are known, according to the ancient Olympic records compiled by Olympedia, the sports-history database.
Those rankings come with a large caveat. Over more than a thousand years of games at Olympia, only a fraction of the winners’ names survived. Any league table of ancient Olympic cities counts known victors, not all Olympians, and the picture can shift with the next papyrus or inscription found.
Elis, Sparta and Athens lead the known victors
Olympedia credits Elis with 117 Olympic titles, more than any other city. Equestrian events account for 40 of them, a reminder that horse and chariot races rewarded wealthy owners rather than the riders. Elis also supplied the judges, the Hellanodikai (“judges of the Greeks”), and by tradition the first recorded victor, Coroebus, a runner who won the stadion, a sprint of one length of the stadium, in 776 BC.
Sparta follows with 83 titles, 46 of them in running and other athletics. The city’s runners dominated early on. In the surviving list of stadion winners, 21 of Laconia’s 27 victories fall between 716 and 552 BC. Chionis of Sparta won both the stadion and the double-length diaulos at three straight Games in 664, 660 and 656 BC, as profiled in the ancient athletes who defined the Olympics.
Sparta also produced the first woman to be named an Olympic victor. Kyniska of Sparta owned the four-horse chariot teams that won in 396 and 392 BC. Women could not compete at Olympia, but in the chariot races the owner, not the driver, was crowned. Her story is told alongside the women’s Heraean Games at Olympia.
Athens ranks third with 53 known titles, including 18 in equestrian events. No Athenian athlete is credited with more than three Olympic wins.
Croton, Alexandria and Rhodes
Some cities punched far above their size. Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, is credited with 23 Olympic titles and won the stadion 13 times between 588 and 480 BC. Its most famous son was the wrestler Milo of Croton, who won the Olympic wrestling championship at six Games in the late sixth century BC. Legend holds that he trained by carrying a calf every day until it was fully grown, as told in a profile of the strongest ancient Greek.
Alexandria, the Greek-speaking capital of Ptolemaic and later Roman Egypt, rose late but fast. Olympedia credits it with 48 titles, and the city won the stadion 25 times. All but four of those sprint victories came after the start of the Common Era, most of them in the first and second centuries AD.
Rhodes produced two of the most celebrated individual records. The runner Leonidas of Rhodes won three races at each of four Olympics between 164 and 152 BC, for 12 Olympic crowns. Earlier, the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes won at Olympia twice, and all three of his sons also became Olympic champions. Miletus, in Ionia on the coast of modern Turkey, is credited with 26 titles, and Argos with 21.
Why the count is incomplete
The victor lists come from scattered and partial sources. The sophist Hippias of Elis drew up the first list of Olympic victors, which was revised and continued by Aristotle, Eratosthenes and Phlegon of Tralles. Those works are mostly lost.
The fullest surviving record is a list of stadion winners compiled by the Christian chronographer Sextus Julius Africanus and preserved in the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea. Because the stadion winner gave his name to each Olympiad, that list is far more complete than the records for wrestling, boxing or chariot racing.
Other names come from fragments of papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and from the second-century AD travel writer Pausanias, whose account of Olympia names many victors.
Even the cities themselves can be uncertain. Ancient writers sometimes changed or invented a victor’s hometown, and athletes could switch allegiance. The Crotonian sprinter Astylos, for example, later competed for Syracuse, and Croton exiled him for it. Sources disagree over which city should be credited with some of his wins.
Early dates are also uncertain. The year 776 BC is the conventional starting point, but historians still debate how far back organized contests at Olympia really go.
On the evidence that survives, though, Elis, Sparta and Athens lead, with Croton and Alexandria standing out for what they achieved in particular eras.
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