Olympic Art Champions

Most everyone I know is watching or at least aware that the Winter Games kicked off last week in Sochi Russia.   Between snowboarding, luge, and more, athletes will be competing with gear and style that looks a lot different from that of centuries past. But one thing that we'll likely never see again is the visual and lyrical art that was once part of the competition. Yes, you read that right. In the early 20th century, art was actually an Olympic sport.  Maybe more people in my life would watch it if there were art competitions!  It would definitely seem odd to go to a sports bar to watch the art competitions.  

In 1906, French baron and founder of the International Olympic Committee, Pierre de Coubertin, thought it might be interesting to integrate arts and culture into the Olympic Games. 

Athletes who also dabbled in art were given a chance to win medals in other events. Rumor has it Baron de Coubertin himself even entered the Games under a pseudonym in 1912. While some of the artists that participated, such as Jack Butler Yeats and Paul Landowski, went on to see success in their careers, many faded into oblivion after their Olympic wins.

Medals were awarded for works of art inspired by sport, divided into five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.

The juried art competitions were abandoned in 1954 because artists were considered to be professionals, while Olympic athletes were required to be amateurs.  (What about that Dream Team in basketball??)  Since 1956, the Olympic cultural program has taken their place.

Olympics: Summer Olympics, 1912
Award: Gold medal

Carlo Pellegrini was an influential magazine artist and illustrator.  His graphic artwork "Winter Sports" won the first gold medal in the category.  After his win, he became a famous caricaturist for Vanity Fair magazine.

Some people get all the talent.  Only two people have won Olympic medals in both sport and art competitions. Walter Winans, an American who lived in England, won a gold medal as a marksman at the 1908 Summer Olympics in the running deer (double shot) competition. In 1912, he won another shooting medal — silver this time — in the running deer team competition. By then, he had already won a gold medal for his sculpture An American trotter. 

The other Olympian with successes in both fields is Alfréd Hajós of Hungary. As a swimmer, he won two gold medals at the 1896 Athens Olympics. Twenty-eight years later, he was awarded a silver medal in architecture for his stadium design, co-designed with Dezső Lauber.

The medals that have been designed for this years Winter at Olympics at Sochi are looking pretty sharp…  

The concept for the Sochi 2014 medal was created by Alexandra Fedorina, modeling and design by Sergey Tsar’kov, Paul Nasedkin, and Sergey Efremov.

The design is centered around the idea of the contrasts that embody Russia and the winter season. The usual metals of bronze, silver and gold, have been embellished with a rather stylish glass element, through which “the sun’s golden rays are deflected as through a prism of snowy mountain tops, the warm sea and frosty ice living side-by-side.” The glass has been engraved with the patchwork quilt design seen throughout the games, and which represents the “mosaic of national designs from the various cultures and ethnicities of the Russian Federation.”

Seven gold medal winners will all receive an additional gold medal, embedded into which is a small piece of the meteorite that landed near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on that exact day last year.  

By Renee Bangerter