Did Russia Miss The 1908 Olympics Because They Were Still Using A Calendar From 45 BCE?

The Gregorian calendar has been in use for centuries, but the switch towards it was somewhat slow, no matter which calendar you were using. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian. Prior to this, most of the Roman world and Europe had used the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE. 

Though the Julian calendar had functioned perfectly well as calendars go, there was a problem calculating the date of Easter, which the Council of Nicaea, in 325 CE, had decided should fall on the first Sunday following the first full Moon after the vernal equinox. A few centuries later, it was noticed that the vernal equinox date set by the council – March 21 – had drifted away from the actual vernal equinox.

In order to try and link the calendar up to the solar year (the time it takes for Earth to revolve around the Sun), the Julian calendar had a leap year every four years, in which an extra day was added. The problem was that since the actual solar year is 365.24219 days, the Julian calendar quickly (and by quickly, I mean incredibly slowly) gains a day every 314 years. 

To account for the movement of the equinox and solstice, when the Gregorian calendar was introduced it was decided that the world should simply skip days. Pope Gregory should have shifted the date by 13 days to make up for the drift, yet after calculations by mathematicians and scientists, he only shifted it by 10. 

October was chosen by the Church to avoid events in the Christian calendar, and after the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi on October 4, the switch to the Gregorian calendar took place, shooting everybody forward to October 15 instantly. For this reason, if you look at your phone you will find that October 5 to October 14, 1582 is missing from your calendar.

Though the Catholic Church adopted the calendar in 1582, it was an early adopter, leading to big discrepancies between the two calendars. Later adopters of the Gregorian – the UK, US, and Canada switched in 1752 – had to skip more days, with Turkey losing 13 days across 1926 and 1927. 

Russia, meanwhile, did not join the Gregorian until February 14, 1918, following the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia, having left it quite late, had to skip 13 days when they adopted the new calendar. They went from January 31, 1918, right to Valentines Day (14 February).

While this might make the claim that they missed two weeks of the Summer Olympics of 1908 seem more plausible, that doesn't mean it is true. Some of these claims have been repeated by Russian media, as well as media from other countries.

“The Russian national team forgot that Great Britain had switched to the Gregorian calendar 200 years prior," Russian news portal, Lenta.ru wrote, per Russia Beyond. "When the Russian delegation started to sign up, it turned out that the Olympics were already very much on, and some competitions had already ended."

Claims suggest that the Russian shooting team missed their event by 13 days. But official records, lax though record-keeping was during the early days of the modern Olympics, do not list Russia as a competitor. Despite this, they list Italy and Australia as "absent", suggesting that Russia were not supposed to enter the event, rather than that they missed it due to calendar confusion.

Despite coming to dominate the competition in later years, Russia was not actually that invested in the early modern Olympic Games, and competitors went only with the support of their clubs, or on their own money. Only six Russian athletes in total turned up to compete in the 1908 Olympics, four of whom were wrestlers. As well as this, Russia was used to dealing with other countries with different calendars. The origin of this urban legend is likely just a joke at Russia's relatively late adoption of the Gregorian calendar, when really they just weren't that invested in the Olympics at the time.