Whose Ancient Olympic Record Did Michael Phelps Break? Meet Leonidas of Rhodes

When Michael Phelps won yet another gold medal in 2016, he broke a record set more than two thousand years earlier by a Greek runner called Leonidas of Rhodes. Between 164 and 152 BC, Leonidas won twelve individual Olympic victory wreaths, a total that was unmatched in the ancient world. He did it by winning the same three running races, the short sprint, the double sprint and the race in armour, at four Olympic Games in a row. (He is not to be confused with the more famous Spartan king Leonidas of Thermopylae, who lived centuries earlier.)

A runner from Rhodes

Leonidas was born in 188 BC on the island of Rhodes, in the eastern Aegean. That is all we know of his early life. Like many ancient athletes, he survives in the record almost entirely through his victories, and through a single striking comment from a later writer. Yet those victories are so well documented, and so unusual, that he is described as one of the most famous runners of the ancient Olympics.

The races he ran

The ancient Olympic Games, held every four years at Olympia in honour of Zeus, began as a single footrace. That race was the stadion, a sprint of roughly 200 yards along the length of the stadium. From 776 to 724 BC it was the only event at the Games, and the winner gave his name to the whole four-year Olympiad. Runners started standing up, not crouching, and by the fifth century BC the track had a stone starting line called the balbis.

The diaulos, added in 724 BC, was a double sprint, up the track and back. The third race, the hoplitodromos, was the strangest. Introduced in 520 BC, it was the last footrace added to the Olympics and was traditionally the last footrace of the programme. Runners wore a helmet and carried a heavy shield; early on they also wore greaves, so the load came to at least 6 kilograms. It may have doubled as military training for soldiers who had to advance quickly in armour.

Why the triple was so hard

Put simply, Leonidas mastered three different kinds of running. The stadion and diaulos, roughly 200 and 400 metres, were pure speed events, while the hoplitodromos was a diaulos run in bronze armour with a shield, demanding much more muscular strength and endurance. A modern comparison would be an athlete who wins the 200 metres, the 400 metres and a heavy obstacle race at the same championship.

The Games had no cash prizes; winners received wreaths of olive leaves. Twelve wreaths, then, meant twelve times the glory, and a lasting name.

Four Olympics, twelve wreaths

Leonidas first won all three races at the 154th Olympiad, in 164 BC. Then he did it again in 160 BC, again in 156 BC and again in 152 BC, when he was 36 years old. For this repeated triple he was hailed as "Triastes", the tripler.

Think about what that means. For twelve years, through four Olympic festivals, nobody could beat him at any of three distances. Sprinting is usually a young athlete's game, and he was still unbeaten in his mid-thirties.

What an ancient writer said

The most interesting ancient comment on Leonidas comes from Philostratus, who wrote a treatise on athletics called Gymnastikos centuries later. According to Philostratus, Leonidas made all earlier theories about runners' training and body types obsolete. In other words, Greek trainers had believed that a sprinter, a middle-distance runner and an armoured runner needed different bodies. Leonidas proved them wrong by winning all three.

Beyond that, the record is thin. We do not have reliable descriptions of his training, his diet or his life after racing, and any stories you may read about those are not supported by the sources used here. What survives is the scoreline, and it is extraordinary.

A record that stood for 2,000 years

Leonidas's twelve individual Olympic titles remained a record for more than two millennia. It was finally broken in 2016 by the American swimmer Michael Phelps. The comparison is not perfect, since Phelps competed in a very different sport with many more events, but it shows how remarkable Leonidas's run was: one of the greatest records in sport belonged, for most of history, to a sprinter from Rhodes.

Learn with Leonidas: English phrases about speed and records

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to set a record	to achieve the best result so far	She set a record for the fastest time.
to break a record	to beat the previous best	He broke the school record last year.
to stand the test of time	to last for a very long time	Her method has stood the test of time.
in a row	one after another, without a break	They won four games in a row.
to be in a league of your own	to be much better than everyone else	As a runner, he was in a league of his own.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a record you would like to set in your language learning, using "in a row" and "set a record". For example: "I studied for 30 days in a row."