Johnny Unitas, Michael Jordon, Wayne Gretzky, Chris Sharma, Laird Hamilton: our list of modern athletic deities tends towards the mortal side of the equation, but this wasn’t always the case. For nearly as long as there has been sport, there have been gods of sport. A list of the deiforms who specialized in hunting alone runs off the page: the Nigerian Dorina; the Roman Diana; the Indian Alopurbi; the Canaanite Astarte; the African Coti, who once gave birth to an eland and thus serves as both progenitor and lord of the chase; the nearly unpronounceable Inuit Tekkeitersrktoc and the even worse Celtic Gwyn ap Nudd, the latter of whom once led a pack of supernatural hounds along his stalking trails.
Beyond this one category, there are Irish gods of strength and physical prowess, Norse gods of wrestling and fishing, Egyptian gods of archery and outdoor activity. Both the ancient Chinese god Tung Lu and the ancient Germanic god Ull governed skiing; while the Aztec Macuiloxochitl watched out for sport’s gamblers. Of course, there’s Nike, the Greek goddess of athletic performance, whose name twisted over time into the Roman Victoria, from which descends our word for triumph in all contests: Victory.
Our most famous global contest began three thousand years ago as a local Hellenistic festival of the gods. Some five hundred years later the Olympics became the empire-wide celebration we think of today, but this was always a spiritual celebration. As Pausanias wrote in 160 CE, “nowhere is the aura of divinity so powerful as during….the Olympic games.” Events alternated with sacrifices and ceremonies, worshiping both Zeus, in whose honor Hercules built the first modern stadium (legend goes that he walked off four hundred paces and called this distance ‘stadion’), and the chariot-racing deity: Pelops. There was an altar for Hera, in whose name the runners competed, and another for Rhea, the mother of Zeus and the technical birthplace of the games themselves. So potent was their pull, in 393 CE, when the Holy Roman Emperor Theodosius abolished the games, he did so to decrease the popularity of pagan religion.
And while these Western traditions used these games as both worship and a way of training virtue—the Christian notion of self-sacrifice and celibacy began as a Greek athletic ritual—Eastern traditions found physicality a path to god in its own right. The Hindu “dehvada” or “way of the body” saw salvation as possible only through physical perfection. Yoga comes from this lineage, as do a bevy of other sports: swimming, wrestling, archery, polo and—of all things—hockey. Hatha nose-breathing techniques, known as pranayama, were developed up oxygen content in the blood (the earliest form of blood doping known to man) thus increasing strength and stamina. As an added bonus, this technique—as several thousand cures for anxiety can attest—also lowers our ability to feel fear.
As Hinduism gave way to Buddhism, this worship of sport continued. Gautum Buddha himself was said to be an ace at archery, horsemanship, chariot racing, and hammer throwing. The Indian un-armed combat technique of kerala, spread globally by Buddhist monks, gave birth to karate and judo among many other forms. It was the wandering holy man Boddhidharma who crossed the Himalaya to teach these techniques at the Shaolin temple in the Honan province of Northern China, an act which begat much of what we think of as martial arts.
Even the notion of surfing as religion did not originate with Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake, rather began as a much earlier Polynesian tradition, both an act of prayer and a way of celebrating the divinity within. So sacred was this activity that even felling a tree to carve a surfboard required elaborate sacrifices to the gods. In Fiji and Samoa and Tonga and New Zealand there are prayers for good surf and prayers for good luck while one surfs. So steeped was this sport in pagan tradition, that one of the first acts of Christian missionaries, after arriving in Hawaii, was to ban this practice on those islands.
