At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, competitors could win gold without running, jumping or throwing anything. They could submit a poem, compose a piece of music, design a building or produce a sculpture, provided their work had something to do with sport. The arrangement was the fulfilment of an ambition held by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, who believed that the competition was incomplete without the arts. He was also sufficiently convinced of his own literary credentials to enter the first contest, although the judges had no idea who they were rewarding.
The ancient ideal behind Coubertin’s Olympic vision
Coubertin’s idea was not simply to make the Olympics more cultured, or to provide spectators with something to admire between athletic events. He was attempting to restore a relationship between physical achievement and artistic expression that he believed had been lost over centuries. The distinction mattered to him because he regarded the ancient Olympic tradition as something considerably more expansive than a gathering of athletes.At the Games in ancient Greece, competitors were not the only figures attracting attention. Poets also travelled to Olympia, where they recited their work before audiences and celebrated athletic victories through commissioned odes. The lyric poet Pindar became particularly associated with this tradition, writing elaborate victory poems for successful competitors, which were performed by choruses during public celebrations. The athlete’s achievement could thus become the subject of a literary work, with physical prowess and artistic accomplishment occupying the same cultural space.The idea had a philosophical lineage as well. Plato’s Republic described an education that combined gymnastics for the body with music for the soul, while the classical ideal of harmony offered Coubertin a model for the kind of individual he wanted the modern Olympics to recognise. He later described this balance as the reunion of two estranged partners, “muscle and mind”, whose separation had impoverished both.The historical circumstances of his youth helped shape that conviction. The first major excavations at Olympia began during the 1870s, uncovering extensive remains of the sanctuary that had hosted the ancient Games, along with thousands of artefacts. Coubertin was then a teenager in France, receiving a classical education at a Jesuit school after having encountered the ruins of ancient Rome during childhood family travels. The discoveries at Olympia gave a new immediacy to the ancient world he was studying.Richard Stanton, author of The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions, told Smithsonian magazine in 2012 that Coubertin had been particularly impressed by the idea of an Olympian who possessed abilities beyond athletics, including knowledge of music and literature. Recreating the Games without some representation of the arts, Stanton explained, would have left the modern undertaking incomplete.
A campaign to bring art back into the Games
The first modern Olympics, held in Athens in 1896 after Coubertin helped establish the International Olympic Committee in 1894, contained no artistic competitions. The programme included events such as discus, swimming, fencing and pole vaulting, but the founder’s preferred marriage of intellectual and physical achievement remained largely theoretical. The addition of water polo and archery in 1900, followed by boxing and lacrosse in 1904, did little to address the imbalance.Coubertin continued to press his case, eventually turning the proposed artistic programme into a serious Olympic project. On August 5, 1904, he published an article titled “The Roman Olympiad” on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro, arguing that the modern Games should recover the character of their ancient predecessors. He wrote that, during Olympia’s period of splendour, “the arts and literature joined with sport to ensure the greatness of the Olympic Games”, and called for their return to the modern competition.The argument received a more formal hearing on May 23, 1906, when Coubertin convened the Consultative Conference on Art, Letters and Sport in the foyer of the Comédie-Française in Paris. Delegates considered how artistic disciplines might participate in the modern Olympics, including whether literary competitions could be organised and how sporting experiences might inspire writers. Coubertin’s opening address returned to his preferred metaphor, describing the separation of art and sport as a long estrangement between partners who had once enjoyed a fruitful relationship.The conference agreed that five artistic disciplines should be included at the 1908 Olympics: architecture, sculpture, painting, music and literature. Collectively, the competitions became known as the Pentathlon of the Muses, and the entries were required to be original works inspired by sport. The plan appeared settled until circumstances intervened in a manner that was particularly unfortunate for an undertaking already struggling to find its place.Mount Vesuvius erupted in the spring of 1906, killing about 200 people and causing considerable damage around Naples. Italy subsequently relinquished its plans to host the 1908 Olympics in Rome, with London taking over the event. The artistic competitions were postponed, leaving Coubertin to wait another four years before his project could finally appear on the Olympic programme.
The founder enters under two assumed names
The opportunity arrived at Stockholm in 1912, although the preparations were hardly encouraging. Interest among Sweden’s artistic community was limited, and the number of submissions threatened to make the entire undertaking look rather less impressive than Coubertin had imagined. Instead of abandoning the plan, he personally took charge of organising the competitions, which were divided into the five categories agreed upon six years earlier.The rules were straightforward enough. Works had to be original, connected thematically to sport and submitted within a specified period, after which a jury would select the winners. The first edition attracted only about three dozen competitors across all five disciplines, while the literature category received fewer than ten entries. One of those submissions came from two men who, as far as the judges knew, were Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach.Their entry, Ode to Sport, was awarded the sole gold medal in literature. Its authors were, in fact, Coubertin writing under pseudonyms believed to have been inspired by towns near his wife’s birthplace. The founder of the modern Olympics had not merely introduced an artistic competition; he had entered it himself and won its highest prize without disclosing his identity to the jury.The poem was a prose composition arranged in eight sections, each devoted to a different virtue associated with sport. Its opening address described sport as a “delight of the Gods” and a “distillation of life”, before moving through themes including honour, joy, progress and the physical pleasures of competition. The writing was expansive and unabashedly celebratory, reflecting the idealistic language of a man who saw athletics as a source of moral and cultural renewal.Modern readers may find its declarations excessive, but the Stockholm jury was considerably more enthusiastic. Its report described the poem as “far and away the winner in the literature competition”, praising its understanding of the inspiration the organisers wanted the category to reward. Coubertin eventually revealed that he had written the work, although the precise moment of disclosure did little to diminish the peculiar distinction attached to his victory.
The competitions grow, but never quite find their audience
The Stockholm numbers were modest, but participation increased during the following editions. By 1928, the arts competitions had attracted more than 1,000 entries, and the original five categories had developed into separate subcategories. Literature, for example, was divided into epic and lyric works, giving poets more defined opportunities to compete for medals.The expansion did not necessarily bring the prestige Coubertin had hoped to secure. The requirement that works be inspired by sport discouraged many established writers, leaving the competitions without the literary names that might have helped them attract wider attention. William Butler Yeats did not enter, although his brother Jack Butler Yeats won a silver medal in painting at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Robert Graves, one of Britain’s prominent poets, entered the literature competition that year and later dismissed the experience in a letter as a “bad joke”.Some of the winning works have since acquired an unlikely afterlife through the efforts of historians trying to recover what the Olympic record books preserve only imperfectly. Among them was Sword Songs, the 37-page poem by Dorothy Margaret Stuart that won a silver medal in 1924. Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics, eventually located a copy at the New York Public Library, describing its dated language and occasional resemblance to a Monty Python sketch. Its sections moved through medieval Scotland, ancient Rome, Renaissance France and eighteenth-century Dunkirk, with one passage describing two warriors attempting to find openings in each other’s armour.Other medal-winning works have proved harder to locate. Perrottet noted that poems such as Rudolf Binding’s A Rider’s Instructions to His Lover, which won silver in Amsterdam in 1928, and Charles Gonnet’s Before the Gods of Olympia, which received bronze in Paris in 1924, had seemingly disappeared. He suggested that the questionable literary quality of some entries might help explain why so many had not been preserved.The 1936 Berlin Olympics introduced another complication, as the artistic programme became entangled with the propaganda ambitions of Adolf Hitler and his regime. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, helped oversee that year’s competitions, which awarded nine gold medals, five of them to German entrants. Germany won the lyric literature category, while Finland took the gold for epic literature. The only American medallist was Charles Downing Lay, who received silver for a town-planning design in the architecture competition.
London 1948 and the end of the Olympic arts programme
By the time the Olympics reached London in 1948, the artistic competitions had awarded approximately 150 medals across their various disciplines. Their history also included a distinction that is less frequently mentioned: Ernst van Heerden, a gay South African poet, won silver for lyric poetry that year, four decades before American equestrian Robert Dover became widely recognised as the first openly gay athlete to compete in the modern Olympics.The London edition proved to be the last. The central difficulty concerned the Olympic commitment to amateurism, which required competitors to remain unpaid in their sporting pursuits. Applying that principle to artists was complicated, since many writers, architects, musicians and painters earned their living through precisely the professional work they were being invited to submit. The distinction between amateur and professional artistic participation became increasingly difficult to maintain, while the quality and quantity of entries offered officials little reason to defend the programme.Avery Brundage, who became IOC president in 1952, was among the strongest opponents of the competitions. Stanton suggested that his position might have been influenced by personal disappointment, since Brundage had entered the literature category twice and received no more than an honourable mention. The artistic medals were eventually removed from official Olympic records, and occasional proposals to revive the competitions have failed to gain sufficient support.Coubertin did not live to see their disappearance. He died in 1937, but had already reflected on the resistance to his project in his Olympic memoirs, published in 1931. He identified the principal obstacle as “fear of the classical”, arguing that modern writers struggled to understand physical exertion, painters favoured approaches poorly suited to sporting scenes, and audiences had lost their appetite for open-air musical performances.His complaint about music was characteristically severe: “The public,” he wrote, “had completely lost all taste for open-air cantatas.”The artistic competitions did not transform the modern Olympics into the union of physical and intellectual achievement that Coubertin had imagined. They did, however, leave behind an unusual record of the period when Olympic champions could be poets, painters and composers, and when the founder himself could quietly collect a gold medal for a poem written under two assumed names.
