They used to award Olympic medals for art?
During all of the years that the Olympics gave out medals in arts, not just athletics – and if you didn’t know about that, the rest of this article may hold more surprises – the pinnacle came in Paris 100 years ago this summer.
The gold medal sculpture at the 1924 Paris Olympics was by a Greek artist named Costas Dimitriadis. His nude, arching, 7-foot Discobole (Discus Thrower) was for weeks displayed prominently in the Grand Palais.
Two years later, before “a crowd of light-frocked women and straw-hatted men,” as The New York Times reported, the prized sculpture, cast in bronze, was planted just outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s Central Park.
“A symbol of human perfection,” a museum official declared that day.
The statue did not stand still for long. Like the Olympic arts contests themselves, it went on quite a journey, largely to oblivion.
‘PENTATHLON OF THE MUSES’
For decades, beginning with the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the Olympics included competitions in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature – a “pentathlon of the Muses,” as Pierre de Coubertin, founder and leader of the modern Olympics, called them.
“From now on, they will be part of each Olympiad, on a par with the athletic competitions,” Coubertin said.
Thousands of artists submitted works. More than 150 Olympic arts medals were awarded, the same medals that athletes received. At the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, 400,000 people visited the monthlong exhibition of entries.
As the Olympics return to Paris this summer, thousands of gold, silver and bronze medals will be awarded – all for sport, none for arts.
“The spirit of Pierre de Coubertin did not survive,” said Nikoleta Tzani, a Greek art historian.
But some artwork did. It is scattered around the globe, some of it in museums or parks, some in private collections, much of it just lost to time and indifference.
In Lausanne, Switzerland, home of the International Olympic Committee, the Olympic Museum has a secured storage area in the basement. Curators oversee thousands of pieces of sports equipment, uniforms, medals, documents, torches, trophies – and artwork.
But the only gold medalwinning paintings in the hidden collection are the two colorful pieces of a triptych that earned newspaper illustrator Jean Jacoby, of Luxembourg, first place in 1924. One represents soccer, the other rugby. The whereabouts of the third oil painting, depicting the start of a footrace, is unknown.
Upstairs, museum visitors learn all about Coubertin and see mementos of Olympic sports. There is no indication that the Olympics ever held serious arts competitions.
Outside the museum, though, a hillside garden is speckled with sculptures. A keen-eyed visitor might take note of one particular piece. It is Dimitriadis’ Discus Thrower, a late 20th-century copy of the one in New York.
“The original won first prize in the sculpture section of the art contest held during the 1924 Paris Olympic Games,” a nearby placard reads, cryptic enough to raise more questions than it answers.
FROM PARIS TO RANDALL’S ISLAND
Patricia Reymond is senior collections manager for the Olympic Museum in Lausanne. On a weekday in March, in the quiet basement storage area, she pondered where all the Olympic art went.
“Of course we would love to have different pieces by the winning artists,” she said, standing near one of the Jacoby paintings. “But it is difficult.”
Researchers have lists of artists and artwork titles submitted for each Olympics, but descriptions are absent or vague. Artists sometimes created multiple works with similar titles, making verification difficult. Little was photographed, or was captured only in black and white.
Curators scan auctions and online sales. Language is a barrier. Not all advertised pieces are declared as having been a part of the Olympics.
The case of the Discus Thrower might be the most illustrative. A Greek American tobacco executive named Ery Kehaya commissioned the first bronze version for New York.
But a decade after its festive unveiling outside the Met, it was uprooted and replanted on New York’s Randall’s Island, in front of a new stadium where sprinter Jesse Owens would qualify for the Berlin Olympics.
The sporting location made some sense, but New Yorkers have long been more likely to cross the bridges over Randall’s Island in a car or a train than to stop there. About 500 acres in size and virtually uninhabited, the island is where Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx are stitched together by the Robert F. Kennedy (formerly the Triborough) Bridge. Below is parkland and sports facilities, mostly, maintained by the Randall’s Island Park Alliance.
The organization’s logo is a silhouette of the Discus Thrower. Depicting an old-style, two-handed throwing form, it looks a bit like a muscular nudist leaning back to hand a loaf of bread to someone behind him in a crowd.
“Most people don’t know what it represents,” Deborah Maher, the alliance’s president, admitted.
The statue did not age well. Worn, weathered and vandalized, missing an arm and the discus itself, it was quietly removed in 1970 and put in storage.
But the Discus Thrower was rediscovered, refurbished and rededicated in 1999. With the old stadium headed for demolition, it was placed on a grassy traffic island at the foot of a Manhattan exit ramp.
It stood there until last fall, when Maher and others got nervous about encroaching road construction. They hauled it away and, on April 16, the Discus Thrower was unveiled, again, outside the 5,000-seat Icahn Stadium, which had opened in 2005 on the site of the previous, larger stadium.
The statue is the centerpiece of a new $1.6 million plaza. It stands tall within a round, raised flower bed and is illuminated on four sides.
“We wanted to highlight him,” Maher said.
That this is 2024, the 100th anniversary of the Discus Thrower’s gold medal, the centennial of one Paris Olympics and the year of another, is a happy coincidence.
To be replanted in a raised flower bed on Randall’s Island may not represent the grandest of Olympic comebacks. But it’s a fate far better than that of the old arts competitions themselves, buried by history long ago.