Imagine spending years training for the Olympic Games. You study your competition. You perfect your technique. You arrive prepared to represent your country before the world.

Then you sharpen your pencil and start working on a poem.

For more than three decades, this was not a misunderstanding about where to report for registration. The games really did include Olympic art competitions. Beginning with the 1912 Stockholm Games and continuing through the last pre-abolition competitions at London in 1948, artists competed for Olympic medals in five broad categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.

One important qualification was that the work had to have some connection with sport.

These were not honorary awards handed out at a reception while everyone waited for the actual Olympics to resume. They were part of the Olympic program, with gold, silver, and bronze medals available just as they were in swimming, fencing, wrestling, and track and field. As the Olympedia record of the art competitions makes clear, the winners were Olympic medalists.

And because early Olympic history seems to have operated under the principle that no idea was too peculiar to try at least once, the story gets considerably better from there.

The Olympics Once Had a “Pentathlon of the Muses”

The man principally responsible was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French educator who was the driving force behind the revival of the modern Olympic Games. Coubertin did not envision the Olympics simply as an international sporting championship. He wanted something grander: a celebration of human development that brought the body and the mind together.

That is why, if you look at the International Olympic Committee’s biography of Coubertin, you will find an entry for 1912 that looks rather strange beside all the references to athletic competition. That was the year his dream of adding artistic competition to the Games finally became reality.

Coubertin had been pushing the idea for years. In 1906 he convened a conference in Paris devoted to the relationship among art, literature, and sport. The resulting concept envisioned competitions in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature—what came to be known as the “Pentathlon of the Muses.”

The five-event name makes sense if you are willing to overlook the inconvenient detail that none of the competitors had to participate in all five. Apparently even the Muses had specialized.

The plan was to introduce the contests at the 1908 Olympics. That did not happen. Rome had originally been selected to host those Games but withdrew, leaving London with a compressed preparation schedule. The art competitions were among the casualties.

Coubertin kept at it, however, and the idea finally made it onto the program for Stockholm in 1912. Considering some of the organizational eccentricities surrounding the early Olympics—something readers of our article about the wonderfully chaotic 1904 St. Louis Olympics will recognize—adding competitive poetry was almost restrained by comparison.

The Rules: Make Great Art, but Please Make It Sporty

The rules for the first Olympic art competition were fairly straightforward. According to the 1912 competition records preserved by Olympedia, entries had to be original works that had not previously been published, exhibited, or performed. Most importantly, they needed a direct connection with sport.

Thus, writing the finest sonnet ever composed about tax accounting would get you nowhere. Write a somewhat less magnificent poem about athletic glory, however, and Olympic immortality beckoned.

The categories were broad enough to invite some interesting interpretations. Architects tended to submit plans for stadiums, swimming facilities, and sporting complexes. Sculptors produced boxers, runners, horses, wrestlers, and athletes. Painters depicted sports scenes. Composers wrote Olympic marches and symphonies. Writers produced poems, plays, essays, and other literary works connected with athletics and Olympic ideals.

The competitions evolved as they continued. By the 1928 Amsterdam Games, the five basic categories had been divided into increasingly specific events. Architecture included architectural design and town planning. Literature included lyric, dramatic, and epic works. Music was split among orchestral, vocal, and instrumental compositions. Painting encompassed paintings, drawings, watercolors, and graphic arts. Sculpture included statues, reliefs, and medals.

In other words, there was a period in human history when you could tell your family you intended to become an Olympic champion in town planning and nobody was technically entitled to laugh at you.

Pierre de Coubertin Creates an Olympic Literature Competition

The first Olympic art competitions in 1912 immediately produced one of those historical episodes that seems carefully designed for a website called Commonplace Fun Facts.

Coubertin wanted literature in the Olympics.

Coubertin got literature into the Olympics.

Coubertin then entered the literature competition.

Under the names Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach, he submitted Ode to Sport, a lengthy celebration of athletic ideals. According to both the IOC and Olympedia’s literature competition records, “Hohrod and Eschbach” were actually Coubertin operating under a double pseudonym.

His poem won the gold medal.

This already raises certain questions, most beginning with some variation of, “Wait a minute.” Those questions become considerably more interesting once we look at how the competition was administered.

Did Coubertin Award Himself an Olympic Gold Medal?

This is where a perfectly good historical oddity threatens to become almost too good.

The Swedish organizers provided money to the International Olympic Committee to conduct the arts competitions. Entries were directed not to some independent Swedish judging headquarters but to 20 Rue Oudinot in Paris.

That was Coubertin’s address.

Unfortunately, the surviving documentation does not clearly identify the members of the 1912 art jury. Olympedia notes that it is “possible, perhaps likely” that Coubertin himself effectively constituted the jury. The evidence is intriguing: Coubertin was deeply involved in organizing the competition, the entries were sent to his address, and no satisfactory jury list has been established. But that is not the same thing as documentary proof that Pierre sat down, examined his own poem, stroked his mustache thoughtfully, and announced, “Gentlemen, we have a winner.”

So the careful version of the story is this: Pierre de Coubertin created and organized the Olympic art competition, entered the literature category under pseudonyms, and won its first gold medal. There is also serious historical uncertainty about who actually judged the competition, with Olympedia raising the possibility that Coubertin himself played that role.

That is quite enough.

History occasionally hands us a perfectly excellent story without our needing to forge another exhibit.

The First Olympic Art Champions

Coubertin was not alone on the artistic medal stand in 1912. The first competitions produced gold medalists in all five categories, although the judges were under no obligation to award every available medal. Indeed, they frequently did not. Olympic art judging could be remarkably severe: if the jury did not believe anything deserved first prize, there simply was no gold medal.

In architecture, Swiss architects Eugène-Édouard Monod and Alphonse Laverrière won gold for their Building Plan of a Modern Stadium. Richard Barthélemy—listed as Italian in the 1912 official report, although his nationality is uncertain—won the music competition with Olympic Triumphal March, while Italian Carlo Pellegrini received the painting gold for his three connected Winter Sports friezes.

The sculpture competition produced an even better character.

Walter Winans: Olympic Champion with Both a Gun and a Sculpture

American Walter Winans was not content to excel at one extremely specialized thing. He was a skilled marksman, horseman, author, and sculptor, apparently regarding the concept of hobbies as an opportunity to become unreasonably accomplished at all of them.

At the 1908 London Olympics, Winans won a gold medal in the running-deer double-shot shooting event. Four years later at Stockholm, he competed in six shooting events and earned another medal, a silver in the team running-target competition.

During those same 1912 Games, he also entered a bronze statuette called An American Trotter in the sculpture competition.

It won gold.

Olympedia records Winans as the 1912 Olympic sculpture champion, making him one of only two people known to have won Olympic medals in both sporting and artistic competition. Better still, his artistic gold came during the same Olympics in which he was also competing as a shooter.

Most people who arrive at the Olympics have one fairly well-defined job.

Walter Winans apparently packed a rifle and a sculpture just in case.

Alfréd Hajós: From Swimming Champion to Olympic Architect

The other member of this extraordinarily exclusive sporting-and-artistic club was Hungarian Alfréd Hajós, whose Olympic career sounds as though two entirely different biographies were accidentally stapled together.

At the inaugural modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, Hajós competed as a swimmer. The swimming races took place not in a heated Olympic pool with carefully measured lanes but in the open water of the Bay of Zea. Hajós won the 100-meter freestyle and then the 1,200-meter freestyle, becoming the first Olympic swimming champion and winning both events in a single day. Modern Olympic records count those victories as two gold medals, although in 1896 first-place finishers actually received silver medals, olive branches, and diplomas.

He was also studying architecture.

Twenty-eight years later, Hajós returned to Olympic competition at the 1924 Paris Games. This time he kept his clothes on and brought architectural drawings. Together with fellow Hungarian Dezső Lauber, himself a former Olympic tennis player, Hajós submitted a stadium design to the Olympic architecture competition.

The jury initially did not consider any of the entries worthy of medals. After Coubertin intervened, it relented—but still refused to award a gold. Hajós and Lauber received silver, while Julien Médecin of Monaco took bronze. The Olympedia results for the 1924 architecture competition confirm that first place simply remained vacant.

Thus Alfréd Hajós became an Olympic medalist in two fields with virtually no overlap beyond the fact that one of them involved swimming and the other could involve designing somewhere for people to swim.

His professional career makes the connection even neater. Hajós became a successful architect specializing in, among other things, sports facilities. The man who had once competed in open water eventually designed swimming pools and stadiums.

There is planning ahead, and then there is converting your Olympic career into its own architectural portfolio.

Some Very Famous Artists Were Olympic Competitors

The art contests were never merely a collection of enthusiastic amateurs drawing pictures of discus throwers in their spare time. Established artists participated, and some of the winners had substantial reputations outside the Olympic movement.

French sculptor Paul Landowski, for example, won the 1928 Olympic gold medal for sculpture with Boxer. Landowski is better remembered today for another project: he was the principal sculptor associated with Rio de Janeiro’s monumental Christ the Redeemer.

Yes, the man responsible for one of the most recognizable statues on Earth was also an Olympic gold medalist.

Olympedia’s 1928 sculpture records show Landowski winning the statues category over a field containing scores of competitors. His Olympic victory is now so obscure that it sounds like one of those facts somebody inserts into a trivia game specifically to provoke an argument.

Other competitions attracted respected painters, writers, architects, and composers, although Coubertin never completely succeeded in persuading the artistic world that competitive judging was something artists ought to embrace. This is understandable. Asking painters to agree that one painting is objectively superior to another has roughly the same potential for harmony as asking ten historians to identify the precise moment the Roman Empire fell.

Olympic Art Produced Some Peculiar Records

Because these competitions existed alongside the athletic Games, they also generated records that look very strange when placed beside conventional Olympic statistics.

At the 1948 London Games, Finnish poet Aale Tynni won the lyric literature competition, becoming the only woman ever to win an Olympic art gold medal. Meanwhile, British artist John Copley received silver for his engraving Polo Players.

Copley was 73 years old.

If the art medals were included in modern Olympic recordkeeping in the same way as athletic medals, Copley would have an extraordinary claim in discussions about the oldest Olympic medalists. Instead, he occupies the peculiar historical limbo inhabited by people who unquestionably received Olympic medals at the time but whose events later disappeared from the official program and from modern medal totals.

The 1948 records also show just how elaborate the art program had become. Competitors submitted architectural projects, literary works, orchestral and vocal compositions, paintings, graphic art, sculpture, medals, and plaques. The entries were displayed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

It was essentially an Olympic art museum in which some of the labels happened to say “gold medalist.”

Were These Really Olympic Medals?

This question requires a small historical asterisk.

At the time, yes. These were Olympic competitions, and medals were awarded through the Olympic Games. Contemporary records treated the art events as part of the program, and the original Olympic reports recorded their winners alongside the other competitions.

Modern Olympic recordkeeping is different. The art medals are generally not included in the IOC’s contemporary national medal tables and athlete databases. That is why someone looking only at a modern list of Hungarian Olympic medals, for example, may not see Hajós’s architectural silver added to his swimming results.

This can produce wonderfully awkward sentences such as “he won an Olympic medal, except it no longer counts as an Olympic medal, although it definitely was an Olympic medal when he won it.” Historians and writers of obscure history are trained specifically for situations like this. Mostly we develop the ability to use semicolons while projecting an expression of fatigue and irritation.

The distinction is worth remembering because it would be misleading to describe the art competitions as merely exhibitions or unofficial sideshows. They were competitive Olympic events in their own era. Their later removal from modern statistical tables does not change what competitors were told they were competing for at the time.

Why Did the Olympic Art Competitions Disappear?

The last medal competitions were held at the 1948 London Games. There had been no Olympics in 1940 or 1944 because of World War II, just as the 1916 Games had been canceled during World War I, so the arts competitions were held at every Summer Olympics that actually took place from 1912 through 1948.

By then, however, the arrangement faced a serious philosophical problem.

The Olympic movement remained deeply committed to amateurism in athletic competition. Professional athletes were regarded with suspicion or prohibited altogether. But serious painters, composers, sculptors, architects, and writers generally made their living by doing the very thing for which they were competing.

They were, in other words, professionals.

This produced the slightly odd situation in which an Olympic runner might jeopardize his eligibility by accepting money for running while an Olympic architect was expected to have an actual architectural career because otherwise there was a fairly good chance his stadium would collapse.

In 1949, the IOC moved toward replacing the competitions with exhibitions because of the professional status of most artists and other organizational concerns. The decision did not proceed in a perfectly straight line. According to Olympedia’s history of the final competitions, the IOC later voted to restore the contests, but the organizers of the 1952 Helsinki Games said there was insufficient time to arrange them. In 1954, the IOC again voted to eliminate competitive art and substitute exhibitions.

This time the decision stuck.

The artistic side of the Olympic movement did not vanish. Cultural programs and exhibitions continued and eventually developed into the modern Cultural Olympiad. What disappeared was the possibility that a poet might stand atop an Olympic podium while the national anthem played because the judges really liked his metaphors.

An Olympic Idea That Was Strange—and Not Entirely Crazy

It is easy to treat the Olympic art competitions as another example of how delightfully strange the early modern Games could be. This was, after all, the era that gave us Margaret Abbott accidentally becoming an Olympic golf champion without realizing she was in the Olympics, along with marathon runners facing dust, poison, automobiles, and inconvenient dogs.

Olympic poetry fits comfortably into that neighborhood.

But Coubertin’s underlying idea was more serious than it first appears. He wanted the Olympics to celebrate human excellence rather than simply physical performance. To him, athletics and culture were not unrelated pursuits competing for space on the calendar. They were different expressions of the same ideal.

The experiment never worked quite as he imagined. Many leading artists disliked the idea of submitting work to a sports-themed contest. Judging art raised obvious problems that a stopwatch did not. Organizational support varied wildly from one host city to another. And the amateurism issue eventually made the contradictions impossible for the IOC to ignore.

Still, for seven editions of the Summer Games, the experiment was real.

People won Olympic medals for novels, poems, paintings, symphonies, statues, stadium plans, and even town planning. Walter Winans won Olympic gold with both a firearm and a piece of sculpture. Alfréd Hajós won two swimming gold medals, went away for 28 years, and came back for an architecture silver. Paul Landowski became both an Olympic champion and one of the creators associated with Christ the Redeemer.

And Pierre de Coubertin, the man who fought to put literature into the Olympics, entered the first competition under two fake names and walked away with the gold medal.

Possibly after helping decide who deserved it.

We cannot prove that final part. But really, at this point, the verified story has already done more than enough work.

If this has changed your understanding of what qualifies as an Olympic event, you may want to continue with our collection of fun and surprising facts about Olympic history. The Olympics have been around long enough to accumulate an impressive quantity of glory, controversy, innovation, and decisions that made considerably more sense at the time.

Competitive poetry just happens to be one of the better ones.

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