LIKE almost every other human activity, religion will make its mark at the Rio Olympics. An American evangelist called David Crandall has organised teams of missionaries to propagate his reading of Christianity (one that attaches great importance to the creation story in Genesis) at every Olympics since 1996; in Rio, he has announced, a team of at least 85 people from seven countries will be handing out 250,000 booklets in ten languages. Pope Francis has tweeted his good wishes to all the athletes and sent a particularly warm letter of encouragement to a "refugee team" drawn from the wave of migrants sweeping through Europe. A priest has been named as "father-confessor" to the Russian team. It has been announced that the Olympic village includes a religion space with facilities for followers of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. But the hard fact is that religions in the ordinary sense have never been sure how to respond to the Olympics. Does this vast global festival offer an opportunity to present their spiritual wares, or does it amount to almost unbeatable competition? In a half-desacralised planet, the Olympics fire the world's imagination in a way that many preachers can only dream of. You don't have be a brilliant sociologist of religion or cultural-studies buff to see the games as one more expression (perhaps the most ambitious, in worldly terms, ever organised) of humanity's yearning for the transcendent.

Both the modern contests and their ancient Greek predecessors share many of the features of a giant sacramental feast. People coming from many different places and circumstances lay aside their differences and in spectacular ceremonies, declare their commitment to a single noble ideal. The games are intended to be inspiring, self-denying and uplifting. As all global religions must, the ceremonies affirm both human diversity and human universality. And thanks to television, the entire population of the world seems to join in.

Pierre de Coubertin, the blue-blooded Frenchman who revived the classical games, did not hide the fact that he was competing with monotheism, and trying to reverse what he saw as a great historical wrong. At the end of the fourth Christian century, an east-Roman emperor who followed the new faith abolished the pan-Hellenic contest as part of his general drive to stamp out paganism. The Gallic entrepreneur was determined to overturn that imperial decision.

"The first essential characteristic of the Olympics, both ancient as well as modern, is to be a religion. It represents, above and outside the church, humanity's superior religion," he declared as his plans were taking shape. And after the first modern Olympics took place in Athens in 1896 (see picture), the Frenchman wrote almost gloatingly of Christianity's acquiescence (via the Christian king of Greece and his clerical friends) in the pagan revival.

[Some] 1,502 years before, the Emperor Theodosius had addressed the Olympic games, thinking no doubt that in abolishing this hated survival of paganism he was furthering the cause of progress; and here was a Christian monarch, amid the applause of an assemblage consisting almost exclusively of Chistians, announcing the formal annulment of the imperial decree, while a few feet away stood the (Orthodox) Archbishop of Athens and Père Didon, the celebrated Dominican preacher, who in his Easter sermon in the Catholic cathedral the day before, had paid an eloquent tribute to pagan Greece. When the King had resumed his seat, the Olympic ode, written for the occasion by the Greek composer Samara, was sung by a choir about 150 voices.

The Frenchman was certainly right about one thing. At least in the classical contests, the spiritual dimension was overt. Ancient Olympia's numinous site had been a place of worship long before the games began in 776 BC. The games were dedicated to Zeus, and if an athlete was caught and punished for cheating, a new statue of the father of the gods had to be erected to make amends. Cheating was not simply bad form, it was an act of sacrilege, an open defiance of a holy obligation.

Whatever the vast differences between Olympic religion old and new, that might be a useful message for the chaplains and confessors serving today's athletes to deliver.