An Olympic Pankration Champion Won His Final Match After He Was Already Dead

Pankration — Greek for "all powers" — was a combat sport added to the Olympic Games in 648 BCE. The rules were minimal. Two competitors fought; the only universal prohibitions were against eye-gouging and biting, with the Spartan Games allowing both. Punches, kicks, joint locks, throws, and chokes were all legal. There were no weight classes, no time limits, and no rest periods. A match continued until one fighter signalled submission by raising a finger or could no longer continue. Bouts not infrequently ended in death.

The most famous bout in the recorded ancient sports literature is one in which the winner died first. At the Olympics of 564 BCE, the pankrator Arrhichion of Phigalia — twice already an Olympic champion — was caught in a body scissor and choke by his unnamed opponent. Arrhichion's trainer, Eryxias, shouted from the sideline, "What a noble epitaph: he was not vanquished at Olympia." In response Arrhichion, working blind through the choke, located his opponent's foot and dislocated the toe. The opponent screamed and tapped out from the pain. Arrhichion, by then, had already strangled. The judges crowned the corpse with the olive wreath, and the body was carried back to Phigaleia and treated as a hero.

The sport stayed in the Olympic program until the games were suppressed by the emperor Theodosius I in 393 CE. Outside the arena it was effectively military training: Spartan hoplites and Alexander the Great's Companions trained in pankration as a fallback for situations when their weapons broke. At Thermopylae, Herodotus says the Spartans fought with their hands and teeth after their swords broke. The modern revival, neo-pankration, was launched in 1969 by Jim Arvanitis and was one of the direct ancestors of contemporary mixed martial arts.