> > Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators

> In the original form of the Olympics, a Roman senator would have been ineligible to compete, since the Olympics was open only to Greeks.

I did debate how to word that mixing of Greek and Roman things in the same sentence. I had emotional context I wanted to convey and considered a word like Decathlon there as more technically correct, but then fought the modern context that of the people that even know what the Decathlon is they know it in the context of it being a smaller event in the modern Olympics, from which perspective Olympics remains more technically correct as the modern English word for both.

As to the text you are quoting, I think it as much supports my claims as you think it doesn't. Ignoring the subject change from "weightlifting" (and sports more generally) to farming and soldiering, it mostly describes the general state of armies and feudalism in general through much of time: you have the rank and file from blue collar classes, and you have the officer corps from white collar classes. The wealthier class is fewer, but given more charge and importance. The lower class does more of the grunt work. The Romans had rich Officers and blue collar "enlisted".

The myth that I was referring to was that weightlifting is somehow a new invention because no one labors physically anymore. There have always been leisure classes that needed to lift weights as a hobby to get good at sports (and that class was also more often awarded medals in sports or important commands in armies, if we want to also connect to the blog post you quoted). As far as I'm aware there was never a period in recorded history where "everyone" was equally fit from physical labor and there was no such thing as training and gyms and needing leisure time to do that.

[Further tangent: Even "pre-history" and the modern (mis)conception of the "paleo ideal" idea of tribes of equally buff hunter-gatherers starts to fall apart when you ask questions about family units or what they think the "gatherer" side of the equation meant (and manage to divorce it from modern ideas of agriculture being highly intense labor) or what those societies would look like if more people lived to old age or how those societies survived things like the Ice Age (fattier and more hibernatory, because we are a mammalian species, we cannot escape that).]