Athletes in the ancient Olympic Games competed completely nude.

In the ancient Olympic Games, held in Olympia, Greece starting in 776 BCE, male athletes competed entirely naked, a practice the Greeks called “gymnos.” The word is the root of “gymnasium,” which originally meant a place for exercising nude, and it reflects how central the practice was to Greek athletic culture rather than being an incidental detail.

Ancient sources offer several explanations for the custom, including that it celebrated the athletic male body as an ideal and that it removed any advantage from wearing lighter or more expensive clothing, leveling the field regardless of a competitor’s wealth. Married women were generally barred from attending the games at all, on penalty of death according to some ancient accounts, while unmarried women may have been permitted to watch. The practice of nude competition continued for centuries until the games were eventually banned in 393 CE by the Roman emperor Theodosius I as part of a broader suppression of pagan festivals.