Swimming for silver
QUESTION
Did any of the competitors in the Olympic art competitions go on to become famous? THE artistic career of Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) is overshadowed by his elder brother, the poet WB Yeats, yet he was Ireland’s first Olympic medallist.
He won the silver medal in painting at the 1924 Paris Games for his work Natation, now known as The Liffey Swim, which hangs in the National Gallery in Dublin.
Yeats is Ireland’s most collectible painter. In 1999, The Wild Ones sold at Sotheby’s in London for £1.2 million.
In 2011, A Fair Day sold for €1million in Dublin – the highest price ever paid at auction in Ireland for a work of art. It was sold by a family who had bought it 67 years previously for £250.
Patrick Dowd, Cirencester, Glos.
FROM the 5th Olympiad in Stockholm in 1912, the Olympics included an arts competition. Medals were awarded in five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture, the so-called Pentathlon of the Muses.
The arts had been introduced by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee. They were dropped after 1948 because of the difficulty of determining the artists’ amateur status.
Baron de Coubertin won a gold medal in literature at the 1912 Games for his Ode To Sport. This was submitted under the pseudonyms Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach to avoid claims of favouritism.
Mahonri Young, grandson of the Mormon leader Brigham Young, won gold in the sculpture competition at the 1932 Los Angeles Games for The Knockdown, a bronze of two pugilists, which is now in the Smithsonian Museum.
He produced public works in New York and Salt Lake City, but is best known for his boxing statues.
John Russell Pope won a silver medal in architecture at the 1932 Los Angeles Games for his design of Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium.
Walter Winans was one of two people to win Olympic medals in sport and the arts. In 1912, he won silver in the team running deer shooting and gold in sculpture for his bronze An American Trotter, a figure of a horse and chariot.
In 1896, Hungarian Alfred Hajos won gold in the 100m and 1,200m freestyle swimming. In 1924, he was awarded a silver medal in architecture for his plan for a swimming stadium.
Christina Powers, Carterton, Oxon.
QUESTION
What was the first internet café in Ireland? THE first internet café to open in Ireland was in central Dublin and was called The Internet Exchange.
It opened in 1996, with terminals that were decidedly clunky and slow by today’s standards. But the idea soon took off and over the next few years, similar cafés opened in Dublin and many regional towns and cities.
But the idea had been slow in coming to Ireland in the first place; the world’s first online café opened in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988, followed by the first in the US, in San Francisco, in 1991. The first internet café in the UK, Cyberia, opened in London in 1994.
In the more than 20 years since Ireland’s first internet café opened, phenomenal changes have taken place in technology, as with smart phones and tablets, making it much easier for people to go online when they’re on the move. In fact, Ireland has the highest rate of mobile phone usage of any country in the western world.
But despite all these incredible advances, internet cafés are still hanging on. Dublin city centre and suburbs between them still have about 25 internet cafés, while Co. Galway has four and Galway city, two.
These days, other places have also installed computer facilities, such as the Dublin city library service. In many ways, libraries have become the modern version of the internet café.
Internet cafés charge anything from 75 cents to €4 an hour to use one of their terminals. Everything else carries an extra charge, including printing, scanning and even copying files to and from disks.
The latest figures from the Central Statistics Office and elsewhere show that the online revolution in Ireland is still far from complete.
About 11% of all people living in the State still have no access to the internet, while 18. 4% of households remain without internet connection.
Robert Gaskin, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin.
QUESTION
Was Sri Lanka ever part of India? UNLIKE other modern countries in South Asia, such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, which have been ruled by various empires, Sri Lanka has remained a distinct region unto itself.
With one exception, the empires of the subcontinent made little effort to control Sri Lanka. The British ruled it separately from the Raj as a crown colony.
The exception was between 993AD and 1070AD when Sri Lanka was colonised by the Chola empire, one of the longest ruling dynasties in history. The Chola empire was established in the province of Tamil Nadu, in the southern tip of India, in 300BC and lasted for 1,000 years. In 993AD, Raja Raja Cholan sent a large army to conquer the Anuradhapura Kingdom in the north. Most of the island was conquered and incorporated as a province of the Chola empire during the reign of his son, Rajendra Chola.
The Cholas were overthrown in 1070 by a rebellion led by Vijayabahu I.
Mr S. Grero, London SW16.
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