Polities and Olympics: Marking the Milestones and Clarifying the Trajectory

This article offers a historical overview of how dominant polities have fundamentally shaped the social functions of Olympic Games since the ancient times. Dominant polities’ role in identifying social roles of the Games is explored in light of four polity types. The paper is a historical process research, and findings are reported in a case-oriented historical narrative format based on secondary sources. The paper concludes that different meanings and roles attributed to the same event–ie. Olympics in the study–compliant with the dominant polity type of the era are the evidence for the social construction of the reality.