Yeah, thought that headline might get you reading. Shame on you. But it's true, there's been some naked Olympic action happening!
Academic Dr Stephen Instone got naked in the name of science, to race against other 100m runners dressed in lycra. He wanted to find out if being naked (like the original Olympians were) was better or worse. He came last, which may well tell its own tale.
Viewers in the UK will get to see Dr Instone's run in all its glory. His programme 'The First Olympian' is due to be broadcast on BBC Two on July 23.
Full story below...
BBC News: Academic recreates naked Olympics
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THE NAKED AND THE FAST: The putative Olympic athlete Dr Stephen Instone may have been naked, but did he maximise his aerodynamics by wearing a kynodesme? I suspect the producer of the BBC's 'The First Olympian' lacked the courage to show us.
The kynodesme (literally a "dog leash") was a thin leather thong wound around the akroposthion (the the extremity of the foreskin) that pulled the penis upward and was tied in a bow, tied around the waist, or secured by some other means.
Vase paintings and statues frequently portray nude athletes wearing the kynodesme (*see link below). One of the most informative iconographic representations is found on an Attic red-figure calyx-krater painted by Euphronios, dating from 520–510 B.C.E. which shows a young athlete in the process of grasping the lips of his akroposthion with the fingers of his left hand and pulling the prepuce taut while his right hand is poised ready to loop the kynodesme around the neck of the akroposthion.
ILLUSTRATED POT: http://www.cirp.org/library/history/hodges2/hodges16.jpg
* A perfect illustration of the kynodesme tied in a bow can be seen in a panathenaic amphora, attributed to the Triptolemos painter, dating from about 480 B.C.E.: Munich 2314, Antikensammlungen; Beazley, ARV (n. 3), 1: 362, no. 14; illustrated in Reinhard Lullies, ed., Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Deutschland. München Museum antiken Kleinkunst 4 (Munich: Beck, 1956), plate 197.
[Extracted from: Frederick M. Hodges. The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 75, no. 3 (Fall 2001): pp. 375-405.]
Yrs - A Historian With An Eye for Detail.
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