They Used to Award Olympic Medals for Art?
The New York Times
The founder of the modern Games thought they should honor both body and mind. But the tradition died years ago, and the winning artworks are largely forgotten.
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.
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, the founder and leader of the modern Olympics, called them.
