The Olympic Wild West
The Olympic season has cycled around again after being postponed for only the 4th time in its history (the other three being because of the two World Wars), and with that comes some of the most storied athletes competing at the highest stages of their respective careers.
In our current cultural zeitgeist, the Olympics have an aura of prestige and professionalism. Only the best of the best make it to the top of the world, and the events that they compete in have a heavy vetting process starting with the International Olympic Committee.
But it wasn’t very long ago that the modern iteration of the Olympics looked very very different.
Before I dive into some of the weirder goings-on in the Olympic Games of the past one of the clearest differences in the games centered on who could take part in the first place.
As we know them, the Olympics were founded in 1896 by a member of the French aristocracy named Pierre de Coubertin. De Coubertin held classic athleticism in high regard, the idea of the stoic amateur taking part in a sport just for the passion of it, and as a result, professional athletes were barred from participating in the Olympics. The perception of many professional athletes of the time was that they didn’t appreciate their chosen sport enough to do it for free. Take into account that many of these athletes were working-class individuals that were just trying to put food on the table.
One of the most infamous cases of this rule is Jim Thorpe, one of America’s most famous athletes at the time, being stripped of his Olympic medals when it was discovered that he was once paid to take part in a semi-professional baseball game. Ironically enough, some of the prizes for winning Olympic events in those days included money or other items of grandeur.
Now that we have the subtle classicism of the early Olympics out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff…like live pigeon shooting? The early Olympics were weird man. The pigeon Olympics only showed up once, in Paris 1900’, which also happens to be the first time that women were allowed to compete.
I wanted to keep this relatively short because there’s one more chunk that I want to dig into so here’s a quick rundown of some of the weirdest events I could find.
- Solo synchronized swimming. (Yeah, I don’t know either, but it looks cool.)
- Tug-of-war (This one lasted from 1900-1920)
- Long and high jump for horses (One appearance, Paris 1900. Something about animals in Paris I guess.)
- La Canne (Think fencing but with a cane.)
- Swimming Obstacle Course (Paris…1900. Alright maybe I need to do a separate piece on that Olympic event because obviously, something was going on there.)
Alright, to cap off my final piece, first let me pose a question.
What do people do in the Olympics?
We could get all philosophical and say something about national pride or unity yadayada but the nitty-gritty is that it’s a giant sports competition. There are many interpretations about what should and shouldn’t be considered a sport, billiards, and bowling versus track and field, that sort of thing. But I think we can all agree on one thing.
Art is not a sport.
Why do I bring this up? Oh, I don’t know, maybe the 151 Olympic medals given out for art.
“Everyone that I’ve ever spoken to about it has been surprised,” Richard Stanton, author of The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions, told Smithsonian Magazine. “I first found out about it reading a history book, when I came across a little comment about Olympic art competitions, and I just said, ‘what competitions?’”
Medals for art were given out for four decades, spanning from 1912 all the way until 1952, for the fine arts, including painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music. There was one rule to these pieces, that they somehow had to incorporate an athletic endeavor, and that, plus a wishy-washy judging process led many of the more well-established artists around the world to stay away from these competitions for fear of damaging their images.
What led to the eventual scrapping of the artistic medals was then President of the IOC Avery Brundage. Brundage, like de Coubertin before him, believed in the purity of athletics with absolute amateurism. Since artists by nature relied on their art for an income this clashed with Brundage’s idea of purity, leading to the eventual dismissal of these competitions in 1952. The competitions were replaced by a non-competitive equivalent that came to be known as Cultural Olympiad.
The medals have since been stricken from the Olympic record and no longer count to a country’s overall medal count.
The Olympics are a spectacle these days. One of the largest branding events in the world and many of the athletes make fortunes off of their respective sports through brand deals and professional competitions. But as recently as 1952 we were still seeing medals for art in the Olympics. It’s just interesting to see where it all came from.