When the Ancient Greeks held the first Olympics in 776 BC it was the competition that was the spectacle, unless you counted naked men running and jumping and fighting and throwing objects while women were kept away from watching.

The first event saw Koroibos, a cook from the nearby community of Elis, winning the stadion foot race that was 600 feet long, and the games saw athletes from the Greek world, as far as Iberia in Spain and what is now Turkey, competing.

Sigh, what a difference 2,800 years make.

The first modern games, created by French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a champion of sports in education, were held in Athens in 1896 – and weren’t brought back there until 2004 – although the Greek capital should be their home.

It’s fitting that Paris in 2024 was the host, 100 years after the last time the games were held there, and in the home of de Coubertin because it showed again this is not about sports but money.

Athens should be the permanent site of the Olympics – you can get sued for using that word because the International Olympic Committee, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, not Greece – says it owns the word, just like it owns the games.

But Athens may never see them again, despite the 2004 opening ceremony being the best ever, evidenced even more over the well-meaning but failed sight of athletes on boats parading along the Sewer River in Paris.

It didn’t help that one of the shows in the ceremony was wrongly characterized as a parody of the Last Supper, with drag queens, but was actually based on a Greek Bacchanalian feast – but neither really belong in the Olympics.

The Olympics used to be the must-watch event of the world, especially when the United States and Soviet Union were dueling in track and field in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Americans hindered by their rivals doping up to get an advantage.

That was the essence of the Olympics: humans in tests of speed and endurance against each other and themselves, pushing beyond their limits and capacity to achieve and surpass and be the best in the world.

In today’s world, the IOC really doesn’t want sports and in 2013 tried to remove wrestling – a core event that exemplifies what the Olympics should be – and has since allowed golf and in 2024 you’ll see skateboarding, climbing, surfing and… break dancing. What’s next? Ballroom dancing?

If the games were held permanently in Athens it would confine corruption to one city instead of a new one every four years and assure the country of at least a gold, bronze, and medal if that’s added as a sport.

Of course, the IOC members who are wined and dined by a shortening list of cities who actually still want to host money-bleeding games that take away funding for vital social services would object.

So far there’s been no reports of any skullduggery at the Paris Games but they are still more proof that this is not about sports but money, no surprise given that any sport with a bloated agency of people with their hands out – soccer – wants a monopoly.

There have been many glorious moments that make the Olympics themselves memorable and have brought some of the greatest achievements by humans in sports – apart from the doping and cheating by Russians, Soviets and some others.

Without the Olympics we’d never have seen Usain Bolt as the fastest man alive; 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comăneci in Montreal in 1976 becoming the first gymnast to score a perfect 10; Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals in swimming in eight days at the 1972 Munich Games – and Michael Phelps getting 8 in Beijing in 2008.

There was the spine-tingling moment at those Munich Games of American runner Dave Wottle, in a golf hat, coming from last in the last lap of the 800 meters with a kick like a Harley-Davidson to triumph after being counted out.

The greatest was Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in track in Berlin in 1936 in the face of Adolf Hitler – who created the torch run as much associated with the Olympics as the ancient games.

But the single greatest moment was Sioux Indian Billy Mills, a Marine Second Lieutenant, who was shoved by world record holder Ron Clarke in the last lap of the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Games but roared back to win – I get goose bumps to this day hearing the announcer scream, “Look at Mills!”

But all of those could have been in Athens and perhaps there wouldn’t have been the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian militants in Munich, and corruption, and inside dealing far from the fields and pools and events.

The IOC should be located in Athens too, but the Ancient Olympics were hijacked by de Coubertin who wanted to bar women from the games the same way American Olympic leader Avery Brundage ignored Hitler’s persecution of Jews to let Americans compete in Berlin.

A year before he died – and had his heart burned near the ancient Olympia, de Coubertin said, “the only real Olympic hero is the individual male athlete. Therefore, no women.”

How about, therefore, no games outside Athens? It’s too late of course, because there’s not enough money to be made doing that.