Did You Know That Poetry Used to Be an Actual Olympic Sport?

At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, Jim Thorpe easily won the decathlon in the first modern version of the event. The grueling, ten-part feat was not the only addition to the burgeoning modern games. Other events that debuted at the 1912 Olympics included architecture, sculpture, painting, music… and literature.

Although often separated, athletes and artists are both performers; they create, and perhaps crave, spectacle. The ancient union between sport and the arts appealed to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the creator of the modern Olympics. In his official report on the 1896 games in Athens, de Coubertin parried away critics with a confident, and true, pronouncement: “I hereby assert once more my claims for being sole author of the whole project.”

His vision for the modern games was quite literary; in fact, de Coubertin created a monthly journal, La Revue Athlétique, “hoping to raise the interests in manly sports in France.” Although not an athlete himself, the Jesuit-educated de Coubertin was drawn to exemplary performance during antiquity, and believed in a union of the “spirit” and the “flesh.” “Ancient Olympia was a city of athletics, art and prayer,” he wrote. “It is a mistake to reverse the order of these three terms, as is sometimes done. The sacred and aesthetic character of Olympia were consequences of its muscular role.”

The artistic jury would “only consider subjects not previously published, exhibited or performed, and having some direct connection with sport.” The Stockholm literature competition had fewer than ten entrants, but included Marcel Boulenger, a French novelist who won a bronze medal in fencing (foil) at the 1900 Olympics, French Symbolist Paul Adam, and Swiss playwright René Morax. The gold was awarded to two Germans, Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach, for their work “Ode to Sport.” The jury was effusive in their commendations, calling the piece “far and away the winner,” because it “praises athletics in a form that is both literate and athletic.” The narrative ideas “are arranged, classified, and expressed in a series that is flawless in logic and harmony.”

Yet Hohrod and Eschbach never existed. They were pseudonyms for Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who had just won the very competition he organized.

Olympic historians remain puzzled about de Coubertin’s decision. The official record of the 1912 games list Hohrod and Eschbach as winners; de Coubertin would not reveal his authorship until years later. Was the medal awarded in absentia? Was de Coubertin being duplicitous in using the pseudonym, or was he seeking fair judgment from the jury?

There are no good answers. The saccharine ode doesn’t seem to warrant the jury’s profuse praise. “You tend by straight and noble paths towards a more perfect race,” the apostrophic work proclaims, “blasting the seeds of sickness and righting the flaws which threaten its needful soundness. And you quicken within the athlete the wish to see growing about him brisk and sturdy sons to follow him in the arena and in their turn bear off joyous laurels.” Yet if we accept that sport and arts share certain traits, one of them is the tendency toward hyperbole. Perhaps the initial jury sought to justify literature’s place in the Olympics.

Historian Tony Perrottet has noted that “many of the winning poems” in the Olympics have “mysteriously vanished… perhaps, as critics have suggested, because of their dubious literary quality.” Perrottet, along with Bernhard Kramer and Richard Stanton, have unearthed “Sword Songs,” Dorothy Margaret Stuart’s silver medal work from the 1924 Paris games. Perrottet is not impressed: “its florid, rhyming verse is a little out of date and sometimes reads like a Monty Python skit.”

Stuart’s poem is broken into four sections. The first is set in a Roman arena:

Swayed like two tempest-tortured oaks
Whose boughs are locked in mesh
The gladiators strive.

The second section depicts a battle between a Scot and Dutchman:

Men breathed not when they ran the course,
Lance against lance and horse to horse.
Strong wrists and hardy horsemanship
Shivered both lances to the grip.

A 16th-century duel in France is the focus of the third section, which ends in violence:

wide-eyed, ashen-lipped,
I saw his face tilt forward as he stood,
Whilst down his thigh ran glittering spurts of blood
That made the fair said into deadly mire.

Stuart concludes her poem with a lighter ballad, which ends with a solemn ode to the weapon:

Now that the brief songs end and the phantoms fade
Called for a little while from the murk of time,
I sing of the spirit that dwells on the bright grey blade.

Occasion verse is a genre unto itself. The Olympics are a grand moment, brimming with pomp and circumstance, buoyed by ambition and nationalism. Restraint—poetic or otherwise—is in short supply. In the closing ceremony of those 1924 games, de Coubertin affirmed:

There is need for something else besides athleticism and sport, we want the presence of national genius, the collaboration of the muses, the cult of beauty, all the display pertaining, to the strong symbolism incarnate in the past by the Olympic Games, and which must continue to be represented in our modern times.

The 1948 London Olympics were the final artistic competitions at the games. At a meeting in Rome the following year, the committee concluded that “it appeared illogical that professionals should compete at such exhibitions and be awarded Olympic medals.” Among the final winners were gold medalist Aale Tynni of Finland—the first woman to win—and silver medalist Ernst Van Heerden, a South African poet who was the first openly gay Olympic medal winner. In one poem, “Die Gewigopteller” (“The Weightlifter”), he wrote:

The sticky grip of the ground
multiplies every pound
the rough braid of the muscle
is—triumphantly!—a brute animal
which with one lightning quick snatch
adjusts the fulcrum of weight.

His work turned out to be prophetic. Four years later, at the 1952 Helsinki games, Van Heerden captained the South African weightlifting team.