Hippodamia was born in Pisa, a city in the region of Elis in the northwestern Peloponnese, the only child of King Oenomaus and his wife Evarete or Sterope. Her father was a son of Ares, the god of war, and he had inherited both his divine father's love of combat and his mortal grandfather's skill with horses. Oenomaus ruled a wealthy kingdom centred on the sanctuary of Olympia, the sacred plain where Zeus, the king of the gods, was worshipped with athletic contests that would one day become the Olympic Games. Hippodamia grew up in the royal palace surrounded by horses and chariots, trained in the arts of a princess, and famed for her beauty across the Greek world. But her beauty was her prison. An oracle had warned Oenomaus that he would be killed by his son-in-law, and the king resolved never to let his daughter marry.

His method was the chariot race. Oenomaus possessed a team of divine horses, a gift from his father Ares, that were faster than any mortal steeds. He announced that any man who wished to marry Hippodamia must first defeat him in a race from Pisa to the altar of Poseidon at Corinth, a distance of some twelve miles along the coast. The suitor would drive away with Hippodamia in his chariot, and Oenomaus would pursue him. If the king caught the suitor before reaching the altar, he would kill him with a spear through the back. Eighteen young princes had tried and died, their heads nailed to the pillars of Oenomaus's palace as trophies, their bones piled beside the starting line as a warning to the next fool who thought love could outrun a god's horses.

Pelops was the nineteenth suitor, and he was different. He came from Lydia in Asia Minor, the son of Tantalus, the king who had once been a favourite of the gods and had lost everything through hubris, the dangerous pride that leads mortals to challenge the gods. Tantalus had killed his son Pelops and served him to the gods at a feast, and though the gods had restored Pelops to life, the family was stained with an ancestral guilt that would pursue them for generations. Pelops came to Pisa with a chariot drawn by winged horses, a gift from Poseidon, the god of the sea, who had loved him in his youth. But even divine horses might not outrun the steeds of Ares, and Pelops knew it. He turned to treachery.

He approached Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, and offered him a bargain: if Myrtilus would sabotage the king's chariot, Pelops would give him half the kingdom and one night with Hippodamia. Myrtilus, who was himself the son of Hermes, the messenger god, agreed. He removed the bronze linchpins that held the wheels to the axle and replaced them with pins of wax. When the race began, Pelops drove Hippodamia away in his chariot, and Oenomaus pursued in his own. The king's horses were faster, and he was closing the distance when the wax pins melted from the friction of the wheels. The chariot collapsed. Oenomaus was thrown from the car and caught in the reins, and his own horses dragged him across the rocks of the plain until his body was torn to pieces. He died cursing his charioteer, and with his last breath he laid a curse upon Pelops and all his descendants.

Pelops married Hippodamia and buried her father with honours, founding the Olympic Games beside the tomb to commemorate his victory. But the curse was already working. Pelops had promised Myrtilus his reward, but when the charioteer came to collect his night with Hippodamia, Pelops threw him from a cliff into the sea below. As Myrtilus fell, he cursed Pelops and his house, adding a second layer of doom to the first. The sea into which he fell was named the Myrtoan Sea in his memory, and his curse would pursue the house of Pelops through every generation. Hippodamia bore Pelops many children, including Atreus and Thyestes, the brothers who would destroy each other; Pittheus, the king of Troezen who raised Theseus; and Alcathous, who rebuilt the walls of Megara. Through Atreus she became the grandmother of Agamemnon and Menelaus, the kings who fought the Trojan War, and the great-grandmother of Orestes, the prince who killed his mother and was pursued by the Furies to the edge of sanity.

Some later traditions added a darker detail to Hippodamia's story. They said that Myrtilus had tried to rape her on the night he claimed, and that Pelops killed him in righteous fury. Others said that Hippodamia herself had fallen in love with Myrtilus and had urged him to betray her father, then turned against him when he demanded his reward. These variants do not appear in the earliest sources, but they show how the Greeks struggled to assign blame for a curse that seemed too heavy for one man's treachery alone. In every version, Hippodamia is the prize around whom the tragedy turns, the beautiful object that men kill for, and the mother who passes the curse to her children without ever understanding its weight.