ATHENS, June 21: Some 600 people clad in tunics raced barefoot in the ruins of an ancient stadium on Saturday in a revival of games held in antiquity at Nemea, 120 kilometres southwest of Athens.

Two races were staged for the runners aged from 10 to 80, one of 100 metres and the other of 7.5 kilometres. No medals were awarded but crowns of palm branches and wild celery.

The event was organised by the Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games, founded in 1994 after more than 20 years of excavation at Nemea by an archaeological team from the University of California at Berkeley, headed by Steven Miller.

The new games, held every four years since 1996, are a form of popular education in history, according to the organisers, as well as a counter to the commercialism of the modern Olympics, which they say “have become increasingly removed from the average person”.

“The Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games believes that there is scope for the average person to participate in such an international athletic festival where no records will be kept and no medals awarded,” according to its website.

“Races will be organised by gender and age, and all participants will be rewarded only by feet sore from contact with the same stones and the same soil where ancient feet ran more than 2,000 years ago.”—AFP