When arts were on the podium
Architecture, sculpture, music, painting and literature were once Olympic contenders

Max Wyman
Vancouver Sun

Saturday, February 15, 2003

- sport, pleasure of the Gods, essence of life

- sport, thou art Beauty!

Thou art the architect of this edifice, the human body

- sport, thou art Justice!

- sport, thou art Boldness!

- sport, thou art Honour!

- sport, thou art Fertility!

- sport, thou art Progress!

- sport, thou art Peace!

-- Baron Pierre de Coubertin

The founding father of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, entered this "Ode to Sport" under two assumed names in the literary competition that was held as part of the "pentathlon of the Muses" in the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm.

It may lack a certain something when measured against the output of a modern poet laureate, but its muscular boosterism suited the idealistic spirit of the new Olympics movement so well that it won de Coubertin the gold medal.

(He also won a second arts gold medal at Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The judges gave top prize for vocal music that year to Paul Hoeffer for his score Olympic Vow. It so happened that the lyrics for the piece were by the big boss, though the judges claimed they "hadn't noticed" de Coubertin's involvement.)

Few know today that for the first half of the 20th century, the Olympic Games included medal competitions in the arts. But the "pentathlon of the Muses" was one of de Coubertin's prized achievements. It was his determined attempt to demonstrate that, like the ancient games on which they were based, the modern Olympics were not simply contests of sporting prowess but also celebrations of creative excellence.

The spirit of the original Games can be summed up in a famous line from the 10th Satire of Juvenal. If we must have something to pray for, the second-century moralist-poet tells us, we should make it mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. That mental/physical balance was the basis not only of the original Olympic Games but of the Greece from which they emerged. The early Greeks wanted to develop the whole person and the responsible citizen. Sport, art and dancing, poetry and mathematics, were all considered necessary parts of the bringing-forth of the whole person: education in its truest meaning. Socrates lived and taught in the gymnasia in which the athletes trained. The sculptor Phydias maintained a studio in the Olympic grounds. His sculptures -- well, we think they're his -- were designed to celebrate and perpetuate the memory of the athletes ... because, as Pindar reminds us in his Olympic odes, unsung, the noblest deed will die.

It was this idealistic vision of man's aspirations to perfectibility that inspired de Coubertin.

By the time Juvenal wrote his Satires, the games that were once the glory of Greece were beginning to degenerate into the bloody and violent routs of professional torture and death that passed for public entertainment until their abolition by the Emperor Theodosius I more than two centuries later.

But they began as sacred festivals, amateur contests of an essentially religious nature, a means of contact with the gods. Religion was interwoven with sport and culture. Games to honour the gods usually juxtaposed cultural events with the sports competitions. The earliest written Greek text that we know of is a poem incised on a terracotta vase. The vase, from around the middle of the eighth century BC, is an early version of a prizewinner's cup. On it are these words: "He who dances most nimbly of all takes this as his prize." It was clearly a treasured possession, because the light-footed winner seems to have taken it with him; it was found in an Athenian grave.

The first recorded athletic games were held at the funeral of Achilles' friend, Patroclus, who had been slain by Hector during the Trojan War. (Achilles, you'll recall, subsequently slew Hector in a fury of vengeance and Troy fell.) Homer memorialized these funeral games in his epic poem, The Iliad.

The Olympic Games, the greatest of the sacred festivals of ancient Greece, were held every four years in July at Olympia. According to legend, they were pivotal to a "sacred truce" between rival kings: fighting would cease throughout the Greek world for as long as the Olympic Games were on. Other legends say they were initiated by Pelops in thanks for his success in winning the hand of fair Hippodamia in a chariot race against her father in the meadows of Olympia.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, secretary general of the International Olympic Committee from 1896 to 1925.

CREDIT: From the book the Olympic Games (dorling kindersley, 2000)
The Discus Thrower, by Greek sculptor Myron (c.450 BC).

Amphora with charioteers, late 6th century BC.

Eventually the program included foot races, the discus, wrestling, the pancration (boxing combined with freestyle wrestling), horse races and chariot races. Everyone competed naked, except for the charioteers, who wore short tunics, and the hoplites, soldiers who wore helmets and leg armour as well as carrying shields when they raced. (Women were forbidden even to watch, unless they owned horses that were competing, though they had their own religious festivals during which unmarried girls competed in sporting events in the Olympic stadium.)

The first name of a winner in the Olympic Games was recorded in 776 BC. A cook named Koroibos dashed across the finish line to win that year's solitary event, a footrace. He was crowned with the cotinus, a wreath made from a branch of wild olive cut with a silver sickle from a sacred tree near the temple of Zeus.

And no doubt he, like all the other competitors of his time, gave public thanks to the gods for his good fortune. It was this early Greek principle of mental and physical balance that the French aristocrat de Coubertin placed at the core of his concept of the Games when he revived Olympism at the end of the 19th century.

"The Olympic Games," he wrote later, "are not just ordinary world championships but a four-yearly festival of universal youth, 'the spring of mankind,' a festival of supreme efforts, multiple ambitions and all forms of youthful activity celebrated by each succeeding generation as it arrives on the threshold of life."

He wanted his new Games to be enriched, as the earliest ones had been, with history, art and philosophy, and in Paris in 1906 he convened an international Olympic conference on art, letters and sport, to examine ways in which cultural activity could be integrated into the Games.

It was a time when modernism was in the air: the revolutionary Fauves had scandalized the Salon the previous year, Isadora Duncan was showing her "free dance" inventions in the world's capitals, Richard Strauss had just premiered the clangorously dissonant Salome. One of the demands of the conferees, no doubt mindful of the import of what was being planned, was that dance be "returned to a more athletic form of expression."

"The Muses' pentathlon," launched in 1912, included competitions in architecture, sculpture, painting, literature and music. Competitors were required to take sporting subjects or Olympism as their theme, and participation was invited from artists from any country in the Olympic family.

Canadians competed frequently; one Canadian competitor, the sculptor R. Tait McKenzie, from Almonte, Ont., has the distinction of being the only artist to compete in every Olympic arts competition (see story on page I4).

But Canada's medal count was meagre. McKenzie took the bronze in Reliefs and Medallions in 1932 for his Olympic Shield, and composer John Weinzweig took the silver in Music in 1948 for his Divertimenti for Solo Flute and Strings, but otherwise we had to be satisfied with a handful of honourable mentions, including one in Architecture for the team that designed Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition stadium.

Today, we have lost touch with the use of sport as a means to make contact with the gods. We have also created a far more sectionalized society, where everything fits into its own particular pigeonhole. Unlike the Greeks, with their ideal of the whole man, we have come to the other extreme -- the specialized man.

But it is ironic to note how many ways abstract concepts to do with sport and abstract concepts to do with art intertwine. The great running champion Roger Bannister said he believed sport provides an outlet in which the human individual's restlessness, even the urge to violence, can safely extinguish itself.

Aristotle saw tragic theatre as a way to arouse pity and terror in the audience -- pity for the great man under stress, terror that it might happen to any of us -- and thus cleanse us of those emotions.

In both cases, we are talking about a form of purification.

Think about the effect of sport and the effect of art and you can find many other places where they intersect.

We talk of the sense of personal fulfilment or uplift that both can provide. We talk of their effect on the human spirit, how they help us gain a better understanding of where we stand in the world, broaden our visions, give us a larger view of human potential.

We talk of the way they show us the worth of the individual human being, and the willingness on the part of the human creature to make itself better.

Of the way they show us how to contribute to a greater good.

Perhaps these are the reasons why de Coubertin, that old idealist ("O Sport, thou art Justice!"), was so keen to return the Games to their original social significance.

To remind us that there is more to life than winning, and that if we wish to hold to something important, we could do worse than seek the essence of the Olympic spirit: mens sana in corpore sano.

Max Wyman is a member of the board of directors of the Vancouver 2010 bid. However, these articles were written without input or influence from anyone involved with the bid.