By Staff Writer Jerri Clewis
The history and lifestyle of Ancient Greece still inspire many practices to this day but none more so than the Olympics. The once-historic practice has become an international event for athletes to show off their talents and win medals, but it did not always cater only to sports.
Ancient Greece held sports and art in equal standing. The Nemean Games, the Isthmian Games, and the Pythian Games held cultural contests alongside sporting events, and the ancient Olympic Games held a “herald and trumpet” contest during the 96th Olympiad, according to the Olympic Studies Centre. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the IOC and the modern Olympics, recognized this and sought to return his Games to their antique roots.
The baron first suggested introducing art in the Olympics in 1904, 10 years after the revival of the Olympic Games, but it took two years for his dream to come true.
Coubertin organized a conference that decided there would be five competitions in the games, which would focus on architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and music, according to the Olympic Studies Centre. The artists would exhibit, publish, or perform their works during the Games and receive prizes alongside the athletes.
The new declaration came too soon for the 1908 London Games, and instead, the first art competition began during the 1912 Stockholm Games. There was limited interest, and the baron resorted to submitting his own works under pseudonyms to make up for any limited entries, which earned his poem “Ode to Sport” the first gold medal of the art Olympics.
Over time, the contests slowly integrated into the games, but the works did not earn as much interest as the sporting championship. Many artists did not trust the event, and some countries stopped sending major artists after a few competitions.
The London 1948 Games further damaged the event’s reputation when organizers hosted the competition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, an expensive venue that posed a problem to the general audience. Around the same time, Avery Brundage became the president of the IOC.
Brundage was a supporter of amateurism and wanted the Olympics to be a pure event that wouldn’t be swayed by money or professionalism, but the artists competing in the art championships were often professionals interested in selling their works, which put them at odds with those expectations.
After the London Games, the IOC decided to replace the art competition with exhibitions, and they would do away with both past and future medals for artists. The Olympics then removed the 151 medals awarded to artists who entered the competitions during 1912-1948 from the record, and they no longer count toward countries’ medal totals, according to the Smithsonian.
Over 1,500 artists and architects from 51 nations took part in the contests during their duration. Some competitors participated in both the sporting and the art championships. One such competitor was Walter Winans, an American who won a gold medal in the double-shot running deer event in 1908 and took gold in 1912 for his sculpture “An American Trotter.”