And you thought synchronized duet swimming was odd. In the Boston Globe, Amanda Katz recalls the era of the Olympics when competitions in architecture, music composition, painting, sculpture, and literature comprised part of the spectacle.
“Ode to Sport,” the gold-medal winner in the inaugural year of the arts competition, 1912, perhaps demonstrates why the tradition did not persist. Among other things, the poem included what Katz describes as “a troubling enthusiasm for eugenics”:
O Sport, you are Fecundity! You strive directly and nobly towards perfection of the race, destroying unhealthy seed and correcting the flaws which threaten its essential purity. And you fill the athlete with a desire to see his sons grow up agile and strong around him to take his place in the arena and, in their turn, carry off the most glorious trophies.
Presented in German and French, and credited to “Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach,” the poem, it later transpired, was the work of the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a driving force behind the modern Olympic movement and a proponent of including the arts in the games. “Worried that there wouldn’t be enough entries in his beloved arts competitions, the baron had written the poem himself,” Katz explains.