Between the years 1950 and 1974 there was a conservative view regarding physical education (PE) and the perception of the body in Greek PE curricula. PE was seen as an ideological means of legitimising political dominance. Before the Athens Olympic games of 2004, educational authorities were assigned the duty of promoting the Olympic spirit in education, and a new PE and sports curriculum was developed. The main question of this paper is why PE was not perceived as an autonomous subject, but had to be related to the State's major political and ideological agendas, in the context of both dictatorship and democracy. A Foucauldian perspective is adopted concerning perceptions of the body as an agent of power, and Bernstein's framework will be used to analyse PE curricula. (Contains 49 footnotes.)