With the Olympics’ return to Paris this summer after precisely 100 years, Pierre de Coubertin lives. Well, not really. But his imprint on the Games endures. Mostly.
What hasn’t changed is the fact that de Coubertin—the French-born aristocrat, educator and historian—was responsible for the Olympic revival in 1896, some 1,500 years after the Ancient Games disappeared, and his idealistic concept of promoting international brotherhood, however imperfect, soldiers on.
But his brainstorm of melding strong body/strong mind competitions—by adding contests in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature alongside the physical activity—has not persisted. De Coubertin died in 1937 and his Olympic art competitions were gone after the 1948 Games.
He had wanted egghead tug-of-wars as a “pentathlon of the Muses.” His plan was to award medals to the best in creativity as well as to those ectomorphs, endomorphs and mesomorphs making a muscle in pursuit of the Olympic motto: “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” (Latin for “Higher, Faster, Stronger;” a motto suggested by de Coubertin, by the way.)
“Deprived of the aura of the Arts contests,” he reportedly declared in introducing efforts of imagination in 1912, “Olympic Games are only World Championships. From now on, [Art] will be part of each Olympiad, on a par with the athletic competitions.” It was his conviction that one doesn’t have to go into oxygen debt to produce something memorable.
So, for the 1912 Games in Stockholm, just to make sure there would be participants in the literature playoffs, de Coubertin entered his own poem, a flowery tome he called “Ode to Sport” (though he did so under two fictitious names, George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach).
It won!
O Sport (it went), pleasure of the Gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled. And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops and flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests.
Second stanza:
O Sport, you are Beauty! You are the architect of that edifice which is the human body….
And so on through seven more grandiose sections…
O Sport, you are Justice!…And O Sport, you are Audacity!….O Sport, you are Honour!….O Sport, you are Joy!….O Sport, you are Fecundity!….O Sport, you are Progress!….O Sport, you are Peace!….
O Boy!
A Russian-born American named Walter Winans, who had won Olympic gold in the long-discontinued sporting test of “running deer shooting, double shot” in 1908 and silver in “team running deer shooting, single shot” four years later, then took aim at the new arts challenge in ’12 and came away with the first-ever gold in sculpture.
No animals were injured in “team running deer shooting,” which employed a moving deer-shaped target 110 yards from the shooter. Anyway, when Winans’ took the podium to receive the medal for “American Trotter,” his bronze casting of a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot, he “waved proudly to the crowd,” according to Smithsonian magazine. A champion again.
There is no record of de Coubertin’s reaction to winning the first composition competition (and, in fact, it apparently wasn’t common knowledge that he actually was George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach until years later). So, he was involved in nothing comparable to the medal ceremony at those Games in which King Gustav of Sweden publicly declared that American Jim Thorpe—winner of both the five-event pentathlon and 10-event decathlon—was “the greatest athlete in the world.” (That’s when Thorpe reportedly responded, “Thanks, King.”)
There were 151 artistic Olympic medals awarded from 1912 to 1948, and in ’48 the British artist John Copley, at 73, may or may not have become the oldest Olympic medalist in history with a silver for his engraving titled “Polo Players.” Alas, David Wallechinsky, the crack Games historian, in his regularly updated editions of The Complete Book of the Olympics, instead cites Oscar Swahn, who was 72 when he won gold in 1908 as part of Sweden’s running deer shooting, single-shot team.
The only person to win two Olympic gold medals in art, a recent New York Times article noted, was Luxembourg’s Jean Jacoby, the 1924 winner in “mixed painting” in 1924 and 1928 champ in “drawing and water colors.” Jacoby died in 1936 but, like de Coubertin, earned a piece of immortality when his design was used on Luxembourg postage stamps for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. And his own image was featured on a Luxembourg stamp in 2016.
The only woman to win an arts gold was Finland’s Aale Maria Tynni for “lyric works” in 1948. Her poem, “Laurel of Hellas,” referenced the laurel wreath, symbol of sporting victory dating to Ancient Games in Hellas (the Greek name for Greece).
When Avery Brundage, an ardent proponent of the Olympic poohbahs’ often hypocritical “pure amateurism” edict, became IOC president in 1952, he ended Olympic arts competitions and had all their results stricken from official records, arguing that the arts entrants typically were professionals in their fields.
But if Pierre de Coubertin and his arts concept were still around now….
Think of the 1981 movie “Chariots of Fire,” which focused on the dramatic journeys of British sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell toward victories in the 100 and 400 meters during the last Paris Olympics, in 1924. The film won four Academy Awards. One of those for Best Original Score by the Greek composer Vangelis.
Gold-medal Olympic art, that.