Olympic Art

In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we talk about how Olympians used to compete for medals in art.

You know how at the Olympics we hand out gold medals for things like swimming, gymnastics, and seeing how far a human can launch a stick? For decades, we also handed them out for poetry. And sculpture. And architecture. There was a time when someone could win Olympic gold not for running fast, but for writing a really moving sonnet about running fast. It sounds fake. It sounds like something you’d see in a satirical newspaper clipping. But it’s absolutely true.

When the modern Olympics were revived in 1896, the vision wasn’t just about sport. The founder of the modern Games, Pierre de Coubertin, believed the Olympics should reflect the ideals of ancient Greece, where physical excellence and artistic excellence were seen as part of the same cultural pursuit. In ancient Olympia, athletic competition and cultural celebration went hand in hand. There were poets and philosophers alongside wrestlers and runners. Coubertin wanted to restore that balance, to create an event that celebrated the complete human being, not just the fastest one.

So in 1912, at the Stockholm Games, the Olympics introduced official medal competitions in five artistic categories – architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. These were not honorary mentions or side exhibitions. They were full Olympic events, complete with gold, silver, and bronze medals that counted toward a nation’s official tally. There were rules, too. All submitted works had to be inspired by sport in some way. You couldn’t just submit a landscape painting or a love song. It had to reflect athletics – motion, competition, victory, struggle, the spirit of the Games.

And here’s where it gets even better. Pierre de Coubertin himself won an Olympic gold medal in literature in 1912. He submitted a poem titled “Ode to Sport” under the pseudonyms Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach. The judges awarded it gold. Only later was it revealed that the founder of the modern Olympics had essentially given himself an Olympic championship. It feels like the kind of plot twist you’d expect from early twentieth-century bureaucracy – technically allowed, deeply questionable, and somehow completely on brand for the era.

Over the next several decades, artists from around the world competed seriously for Olympic medals. American architect John Russell Pope, who would later design the Jefferson Memorial, won a silver medal at the 1932 Los Angeles Games for a gymnasium design. Hungarian composer Ferenc Farkas competed in music. Painters created large canvases of rowers slicing through water or boxers frozen mid-swing. Sculptors submitted bronze figures of runners caught in motion. These weren’t hobbyists dabbling in art. Many were respected professionals whose work appeared in galleries and public spaces.

And that became the problem. The Olympic movement at the time was fiercely committed to the idea of amateurism. Athletes were not supposed to be paid professionals. They were meant to compete for honor, not income. But most serious artists made their living selling their work. They were, by definition, professionals. That clashed with the strict rules enforced by the International Olympic Committee. It became increasingly awkward to insist that a painter who sold canvases for a living was somehow an amateur simply because the subject matter was sport.

There were other issues as well. Judging art is inherently subjective. It’s relatively straightforward to measure who jumps higher or runs faster. It’s far more complicated to determine whether one poem is objectively better than another, or whether a sculpture captures motion more effectively than its competitors. By the late 1940s, criticism of the art competitions had grown louder, and the International Olympic Committee began reconsidering their place in the Games.

In 1948, at the London Olympics, the final official art medals were awarded. After that, the competitions were discontinued and replaced, beginning in 1952, with non-competitive cultural exhibitions. Art would still be present at the Olympics, but no longer as medal events. However, the medals awarded between 1912 and 1948 were never revoked. They still count as official Olympic medals. More than 150 medals were awarded in the arts during that period.

Which means that somewhere in the record books, there are individuals who are Olympic champions in literature, architecture, painting, music, and sculpture. Imagine explaining that at a dinner party. “My grandfather was an Olympian.” “Oh really? What event?” “Bas-relief sculpture.” It sounds like a punchline, but it’s historically accurate.

What makes this story fascinating isn’t just the novelty of it. It’s the philosophy behind it. The early modern Olympics attempted to unite mind and body, to recognize that human excellence isn’t confined to muscle and speed. For a brief period in history, a gold medal could be awarded not just for crossing a finish line first, but for capturing the spirit of that race in words, paint, stone, or sound.

Today, we tend to separate athletes and artists into different cultural categories. But for a few decades in the twentieth century, the Olympic podium belonged to both. And somewhere in history, a poet stood there, medal around their neck, having trained not on a track but at a desk.

The internet says it’s true.