When you start taking the original sports away from the

Cael Sanderson, a legend of the mat, declared: “When you start taking the original sports away from the Olympics, you really change what the Olympic Games are.” In these words, he speaks not simply as a wrestler, but as a guardian of tradition. His cry is one of reverence, for he knows that the Olympics are not merely competitions but a bridge across centuries, uniting us with the ancients through the same struggles of strength, speed, and spirit. To remove those roots is to sever the living tree from the soil that nourishes it.

The original sports—wrestling, running, throwing, lifting—are more than contests of skill. They are the primal tests of humanity, the measurements by which man first proved himself in the eyes of gods and men. The ancient Greeks gathered at Olympia not for spectacle alone, but to honor Zeus, to celebrate the human body in its rawest and most noble form, and to declare that excellence was the highest offering a mortal could make. To strip these away in favor of novelty is to forget the sacredness of origin.

Sanderson himself speaks as a child of this tradition. As an undefeated wrestler, he knows that the mat is not simply fabric and chalk, but an altar where ancient warriors still whisper. Wrestling is as old as recorded history—it is carved on Egyptian tombs, sung of in Homer’s Iliad, and preserved in nearly every culture. To remove it from the Olympics would not be to make a small adjustment; it would be to betray the very essence of what the Games are. His words echo the sorrow of one who sees time threatening to erase memory.

History has shown us what happens when traditions are abandoned. Consider Rome in its later days, when the games of the Colosseum shifted from contests of skill to spectacles of blood. What once honored courage and discipline decayed into mere entertainment, a shadow of its former meaning. The people cheered louder, but the soul of the games was lost. So too would the Olympics lose their heart if the sports of origin were replaced by fleeting trends designed only to dazzle the eye.

Yet Sanderson’s words are not only lament—they are warning and lesson. For traditions are not chains to hold us back, but roots that give us strength. Innovation has its place, but if the foundation is destroyed, the house cannot stand. To protect the Olympic Games is not to resist change entirely, but to remember that its soul rests in continuity with the past. Without the original sports, the Games become a festival without meaning, a flame without fuel.

The deeper teaching is this: in life as in sport, we must honor our origins. Families, nations, communities—all grow, all evolve, but if they forget their beginnings, they lose their identity. Just as the Olympics without wrestling, running, and lifting would cease to be the true Olympics, so too does a person or a people lose their way when they abandon the virtues and struggles that first shaped them.

Therefore, let us heed Sanderson’s call: cherish the foundations, even as we build higher. Welcome the new, but never cast aside the old. In your own life, guard the disciplines, the stories, the values that first gave you strength. For without them, you are like the Games without their origins—bright for a moment, but empty of meaning. With them, you stand in continuity with history itself, a living part of the great chain of human striving. This is the eternal spirit of the Olympics, and it is the eternal spirit of life.