News Flash: The Winter Olympics will be in full force when this column appears. The Olympics are brought to us by that paragon of human rights, Communist China. This year’s event will be spiced up by the Rona, Chinese soldiers in HazMat suits, wall-to-wall nasal swabs, and the inscrutable sport of Curling. It’s going to be huge. Have you been pondering the historic origin of this fine event? The Olympics have been around even longer than Betty White, RIP. Mr. Google reports the ancient Greeks started the festivities around 776 BC. The Greeks ran the Olympics every four years from 776 BC to 425 A.D. That works out to about 1200 years, not a bad run. After a brief pause of 1471 years, the modern Olympics resumed in 1896 in Athens, Greece, for those of you counting.

Let’s take a ride in Mr. Peabody’s Way Back Machine to find out how the games began. Like most events that happened over 2700 years ago, the birth of the original games is shrouded in a bit of mystery. Here are three Greek stories about how the games came to be. Uh oh, herein lies yet another column mangling Greek mythology. Beware. Beware.

Version One says the Olympics began at Olympia when Zeus defeated his father, Cronus. Cronus was not a candidate for Dad of the Year. He ate his children to keep them from overthrowing him. Zeus’ mom substituted a rock for Baby Zeus, which Cronus ate, thinking the rock was Baby Zeus. Hence the term dumb as a rock was born.

Version Two says Hercules gets credit for the Olympics by celebrating his victory over King Augeas. The King hired Herc to clean out his stables. Herc did his job, but then the King reneged on paying him. Troubles ensued. Herc terminated the King with extreme prejudice. Then it was Party On, Herc. The Olympics were born.

My favorite Olympic origin story involves Prince Pelops of Ionia. The Greek King Oenomaeus decided to give the hand, and the rest, of his lovely daughter Hippodamia in marriage to anyone who could beat him in a chariot race. Pelops jumped at the chance to win Hippodamia. His love for her was as overwhelming as the love felt by Claude King for Clifton Clowers’ pretty young daughter in the classic song Wolverton Mountain. Pelops’ love for her was big as the sky. He wrote her a love poem promising: “Sure as the vine twines round the stump, you are my darling sugar lump.”

Pelops went all out to win the chariot race. In the first documented case of Olympic cheating in sports history, Pelops came up with a nefarious plan. He got a team of magic horses from his old buddy Poseidon the God of the Sea. It is unclear if the equines were originally sea horses. No matter. If magic horses weren’t enough, Pelops bribed Myrtilus the Chariot Master to sabotage King O’s chariot. Myrtilus pulled out the linchpins holding the chariot’s wheels to their axles. He replaced the pins with wax replicas. Once the race started, the heat from the spinning chariot wheels melted the fake wax linchpins causing the wheels of King O’s chariot to fall off. King O got tangled in the reins of the chariot. He was dragged to a painful gooey death by his team of horses. Naturally, Pelops won the race and Hippodamia.

In the case of the old double-cross switcheroo, when Myrtilus came to collect the rest of his fee for waxing the chariot, Pelops refused to pay him. Instead, Pelops threw Myrtilus off a convenient cliff to his death on the rocks far below. Pelops operated on Stalin’s theory: No Man, No Problem. Or the pirates’ theory that dead men tell no tales. But the story doesn’t end there. Myrtilus’ ghost began haunting Pelops. The haunting became such an irritation for Pelops that he realized the only way to rid himself of this meddlesome ghost was to perform the ritual Funeral Games.

Nowadays, people stand around at funerals viewing the deceased guest of honor saying: “My, oh my, don’t he look natural? He never looked that good in life,” before retiring to the Fellowship Hall to eat fried chicken, deviled eggs and potato salad. Back in Greek mythology days, people performed the precursors of Frank Costanza’s Festivus Feats of Strength by having athletic Funeral Games like races, rassling and javelin throwing.

To get rid of Myrtilus’ ghost, Pelops put on a giant set of Funeral Games which gave birth to the Olympics. A funeral today with javelin tossing would be much more entertaining than just eating deviled eggs and discussing why the Tar Heel basketball team is so erratic. But I digress.

So, what have we learned today? Once again, precious little. However, we can now have an enhanced appreciation of the long history of cheating in the Olympic games. The Chinese, Russian and North Korean teams’ efforts along these lines are just following the traditional Olympic Spirit initiated by Myrtilus and his waxed linchpins. Don’t get upset. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.