Not since the heyday of Athenian culture has cat flinging enjoyed such general and unquestioned acceptance. The Greeks knew and understood the true art of the fling which formed integral part of their daily life and tradition. For centuries no Hellenic adolescent male was without flinging ambition, a brace of flinging cats was to him what skate board, video game, and stereo are to his modern developed country counterpart. As the cultural focus declined, flingery suffered as well. Seeds of anti-flingist sentiment were sown which were to plague flingery throughout the subsequent millennium. The great Olympic games likewise degenerated as the central role of the cat was supplanted by inanimate objects with varying aerodynamic properties. In the styles of flinging: the "hurl", the "throw", and the "put" were each redefined as means to propel inanimate projectiles, the discus, javelin, and shot respectively. Although clearly recognized as a poor substitute for the cat, the new forms gradually prevailed -- a symptom of the festering decay of a once magnificent seat of art and wisdom.
There were those who tried to prolong and revive the art. The renowned catputter Mistrastos Bostus insisted on putting the cat long after the use of shot had become the norm. But it was his success that sealed the fate of cat flinging as his bested opponents succeeded in having the use of live cats ruled unfair. (use of dead cats temprarily, lead dipped cat ###) In a desperate effort to prevent the possible revival of flingery, anti flingists then launched a campaign to eradicate all evidence of the use of cats in the games; literary references were altered to reflect the later degenerate agonistic practices, and art works depicting the great early Olympians with their cats were likewise defaced to conform to currently accepted historical interpretation. Though relatively little effort has been made to rectify this appalling distortion of history, attempt is made in this volume to restore some of the early Greek athletic sculpture to an approximation of its original glory.