In Athens, the opening of the first modern Olympic Games is celebrated

For fifteen centuries, the greatest athletic tradition the world has ever known simply… stops. No fanfare, no farewell — just silence, enforced by imperial decree in 393 AD. Then, on a spring morning in 1896, 80,000 people crowd into a gleaming marble stadium in Athens and hold their breath together. Today's microsite tells the story of the longest comeback in human history — and the audacious dreamers who refused to let the fire stay cold.

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