December 1, 2022 • 40 mins
Everyone's heard of the Olympics. This global competition brings athletes from around the world together to compete in various sports -- but, not too long ago, one man led the charge to bring artists, sculptors, musicians and more into the fray, with medal-worthy competitions of their own. In today's episode, the guys explore how this became part of the Olympics... and why the organization eventually revoked every single medal they awarded, striking these artists' work from the record.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Who's that running towards the
finish line? Why it's our super producer, Mr Max Williams.
He goes, he's like a blur, He's like a flash,
like a rocket, and I'm painting the whole thing. Is
that go? Real? Real gold medal material? Almost said cold
(00:50):
war material, but that's a different episode. I'm dead your
knowl And today, ma'am, we're gonna talk about the Olympics
with some help from our research associate Jeff, but not
in a way that most people might think. Now you
might have seen the title of this episode Olympic Visual Arts,
and you might have pictured various Olympic mascots are branding,
(01:14):
you know, the rings or what is his name? Is
he a little guy for the Atlanta Olympics. Is now
quite a collectible little fella. He kind of looks like
a like a tear drop for something. It looks like
you should be a mascot for like a water company
or something. You know, yeah, I could go with water company.
Maybe also an electric company, because sometimes blue is electricity
(01:34):
and mask in the land of mascots. You know, it's
it's funny because back, uh, not too long ago, we
did an episode about former Olympic sports, Olympic sports of yesteryear,
and it might surprise some of our fellow ridiculous historians
to know that art used to be in the Olympics.
That's right, folks, a rt art, not art. Garf uncle,
(01:58):
We're not gonna plot twist you that way. No, we're
not talking about Paul Simon either, nor are we talking
about Olympic mascot art. We are talking about art as
a sport sort of kind of per se. Yeah. Yeah.
This comes to us in large part thanks to the
work of Richard Stanton, the author of a book called
(02:19):
The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions. Richard says, I first filmed
out about it reading a history book when I came
across a little comment about Olympic art competitions, and I said,
what competitions. This sparked his curiosity, piqued his interest, and
so he wrote the first and as far as we know,
(02:39):
only English language book on the subject of Olympic art competitions. Right,
some of the research we we dug through for this
had Stanton digging doing some digging himself through boxes of
records in the International Olympic Committee archives in Switzerland. And
as everyone knows this with have very poor penmanship. It's
(03:02):
the hallmark of of the country. Uh. Maybe that's not
entirely true, but apparently some of these were kind of
hard to read and did require a little bit of
detective work and sort of piecing together the forgotten history
of Olympic art competitions. Yeah, and this all goes back
to an aristocrat, Baron de Cobalting. Uh. This guy was
(03:25):
the founder of the International Olympic Committee and the modern
Olympic Games as we know them today. And if he
asked the Baron, he would say, look, one of the
big important pieces of the Olympics, in my vision, is
an art competition. Because he was consumed with this idea,
this vision of what defined a true Olympian, and to him,
(03:49):
a true Olympian is not just someone who could lift
heavy weights or run very quickly or swim like a fish. No,
they also were skilled in the classics, in music and literature.
He thought the Olympics would be incomplete if they did
not have some aspect of the arts. Yeah, because we
kind of forget sometimes that the Olympics, in their original
(04:14):
incarnation were meant to be a celebration of of the muse,
you know, of all things creative, you know, dating back
to ancient Greece, arts at sports were kind of considered
another art form in and and of itself, celebrating the artistic
expression of the human body itself. Yeah. Yeah, and I
(04:34):
see a flex in there, Max. That's that's nice. Uh.
I didn't know you were bringing guns to the show,
but never don't bring don't bring a knife to the
gun show. You always got to bring guns, right or
the fantastic restaurant here in Atlanta guns show. The chefs
have their own knives, so you don't need to bring them. Yeah.
(04:58):
That was an awkward moment for me, but still a
great night. So the guy the baron, right, he says,
I'm not making this up out of whole cloth. I'm
not coming from a vacuum here. This is something that
calls back to the ancient days of the Olympics. As
you mentioned, nol and I want there to be this
(05:19):
strong connection between the athletes, the artist, and the spectators.
So let's have art be part of the competitions. Uh,
he said, I mean he talks about regaining the glory
of the Olympics, right becoming bringing it back to life,
back to reality, and he sees the fine arts combining
(05:42):
harmoniously with the Games. This came up at the Olympic
Congress in nineteen o six, but they said, you know,
we don't have enough time this iteration. The Olympic Congress
of nineteen o six was planning the eight Games in
London and they said, look, Barren, we got your back,
(06:02):
but we might have to kick the can down the
road a bit here. And kicked the can they did
down the road a handful of years to the nineteen
twelve Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. And you know, as
is the case, I think aren't X Games type sports
now incorporated into the Olympics. There's I know that there are.
(06:24):
They're always shake ups that get proposed, and sometimes these
sports or changes to existing sports are more welcome than others.
Like I think we were talking about fair with Max
confirming that skateboarding is one but not all X Games. Right. Yeah,
it's like some I can't remember off the top of
(06:45):
my head, but I think they just added in park
but for a while they didn't have half pipe, even
though they had half pipe snowboarding in the Winter Olympics.
I mean, my personal favorite sport, baseball, just got added
back in with the most previous Olympics after being out
for like two decades. Isn't constant flux what sports are in?
What or not? Like obviously, like track and field is in.
(07:07):
Like guys running fast and people swimming far, those are
always in, but they change around a lot. Yeah, And
such was the case with figuring out how to introduce
art into the Olympic Games. So they kind of whittled
it down to five categories, which were architecture, music, painting,
literature and sculpture. And then of course they were later
(07:30):
subdivided even further into things like drama for literature and
um epic, which I guess would be like poetry, epic
poetry or lyric literature. I imagine that a sort of song, yeah,
or spoken word there were I saw the there was
an Olympic, an Olympic event held in Canada, and one
(07:50):
of the opening ceremonies a few years ago was this
just tremendously well done spoken word poem. And I know
spoken word gets a bad rap and folks. Yes, I'm
the first to say that eight of it might be
Ah swinging a miss for a lot of people, but
that other is life changing level good. And this, this
(08:12):
is a remnant of that idea, that attachment to the arts.
They also started dividing music into orchestral and instrumental, solo
and chorus singing or chorl And they also started looking
into ways to separate visual arts paintings from graphic arts,
drawings from paintings. This one surprised me. For sculpture, they
(08:37):
didn't just say statues are different from reliefs. They also said,
let's count medallion's why not? Maybe that's maybe you just
made the best medallion. Conflict of interest though, right, perhaps
what happens when a competitor makes a gold medal as
their submission. That's very meta and it's funny because, I
mean you could probably start to see where this becomes
(09:01):
difficult to judge, I mean, in competitions, you know, exclusively
for the arts, singing, music, literature, etcetera. It's not really
a point system, you know, I mean, it's very subjective.
So whereas sports, you know, are measured in measurable things
like yards, ran or or time you know, achieved you
(09:21):
know for a certain length, or points scored in a
particular game that has like a standardized scoring system. That's
not the case with painting, unless you're just doing speed painting.
It's like who finishes first or whatever. It is much
more of a subjective taste based kind of judging. Yeah. Yeah,
And that's why, in certain circumstances, competitors might not even
(09:45):
get a medal. If the judges looked around and they
were unable to come to a consensus on their subjective
opinions about a work of art, they might only award
a bronze medal. And that's you know, that's very distinct
from the way the rest of the Olympic events would go.
(10:05):
As the kids say, they might be these were all
pretty mid, so we'll just give out a bronze. Yeah,
but good hustle everybody, and nice medallion. Also, your plaque
is good. I just can't choose bronze medals for all.
There were thirty three people who participated in the very
(10:28):
first Olympic art competition for the Modern Olympics in nineteen twelve,
and that during the nineteen twelve competition, there was a
gold medal awarded in all of the five categories. We're
getting this research directly from the Olympic Olympics dot com,
so they do quite a good job of of, you know,
(10:50):
laying out all of the history of this very unusual
period in the Olympic Games. Yeah, shout out to the
author that Indra shasta Kova. So if you look at
their history here, you'll see that there were some rules
for submissions, and if you've ever been in a writing competition,
or you've ever submitted to a journal or something like that,
(11:14):
then you'll recognize some of this. You might also run
into it. In some gallery competitions, judges could only score
works that had never been exhibited anywhere else, and they
have also had to be dedicated to sports, so there's
a theme to it. The baron himself, by the way,
he participated in a literature competition under a pseudonym and
(11:39):
his piece won a gold medal. Corruption. That's a little suspicious.
Did you say the name of I love it It's
to Sport, which, again, like I don't want to judge
it just by the title. I haven't read it yet.
Maybe it's amazing, but ow to Sport sounds a little
(12:01):
on the nose for the gold medal. I'd love to
see who else entered the literature competition. Correct, So fun
fact from the nineteen twelve Games UM the United States entry,
Walter Winnens won the win. Winnens won UH an Olympic
gold medal in shooting four years prior. But then later
(12:24):
I guess you had like a little side hustle as
a sculptor. He became the Olympic gold medalist in that
category in sculpture UH in Sweden. He'd also won an
Olympic medal in shooting that same Games. Yeah, and then
there is one other guy who won medals in art
(12:44):
and sports, and that is Alfred Hajos from Hungary two
gold medals in Athens in eighteen six and a few
years later won the silver medal in architecture. Look, we
know that most people hearing this today do not associate
the athletic feats of the Olympics with the aesthetic feats
(13:07):
of the art world. And back in Antwerp in the
nineteen twenties, the situation was kind of similar. The art
competition didn't get a lot of press, didn't get a
lot of attention, It didn't draw a ton of crowds.
But this changed just a few years later when the
Olympics went to Paris in nineteen. Well, it's also I mean,
(13:28):
it's not no, no, no shade on on art or whatever,
but it's not exactly the most captivating thing to exhibits
in terms of a spectator. Um, you know, sport like
these are obviously things that are presented and then displayed
in some sort of gallery type situation, at least in
terms of the visual arts. I don't know that we
(13:49):
have any information about how we're the were the poems
and the literature pieces read aloud by the writers like
wild fighting, Oh no, weld swordfighting okay? On top uh?
Galloping steeds, yes, yes, uh? And and uh the pages
they were reading would be lit on fire. Uh No,
(14:12):
we're just making up a really interesting competition. But this
reminds me I want to shout out one of our uh,
one of our friends on our Facebook page, ridiculous historians.
Robin w hipped us to a real sport called chess boxing.
You alternate rounds of rapid chess and rounds of boxing
until someone wins in one of those categories. Oh that's
(14:37):
so funny. I never knew that there's a Woo Tank
Clan song called The Mystery of Chess Boxing, and um,
I never knew what that was referring to until now.
They don't actually say that in the in the in
the lyrics at all, but that is the name of
one of my favorite tracks off of the thirty six
Chambers record. Nice. Yeah, And we don't know if they're
(15:00):
talking about I think they're talking about applying a martial
arts mentality to chess. I don't think they're talking about
alternating rounds. But maybe they are connected, you know, maybe
secretly some members of the Wu Tang clan our world
class chess boxers. If so, we'd love to see a clip.
Of course it's it's named after a kung fu film
(15:23):
Hong Kong film from nineteen seventy nine directed by Joseph
Koo called The Mystery of Chess Boxing. You know that
the Wu Tang clan loved some some kung fu pictures.
Of course, who doesn't I love kung fu movies as well.
You know, I'd say I love kung fu movies as
much as uh. The attendance of the Olympics in Paris,
(15:45):
loved the art competition almost two hundred people submitted works
of art, including three Soviet artists, and this was interesting
because at the time the Soviet Union was not participating
in the Olympics. There was some geopolitical tension. The jury, right,
the judges for the art competition in the Paris Games
(16:09):
was also um pretty creme de la creme. They were
pretty posh. The first woman to receive the Nobel Prize
in literature was there that Sweden's Selma lager Loaf. And
then a famous Russian composer, the one and only Igor Stravinsky.
Oh yeah, is Rights of Spring. Uh an episode unto
itself in terms of the premiere of that piece that
(16:31):
I believe caused some manner of riots because the music
was just so stark and intense and in your face
and you know, for lack of a better term, at
the time modern, you know, it just wasn't the classical
music was very formal and and meant to kind of
stick to the hits and sort of the forms of
of classical composers in history. And Stravinsky, with this kind
(16:55):
of atonal, clashy, kind of very you know, storm and
drawn kind of vibes, really turned that whole thing on
his head, so very interesting to see. I'm not this
must have been after he of course, this would have
been after he was already established and kind of you know,
got his bona fides and was no longer like this
iconoclastic figure. Yeah, they weren't putting him as a member
(17:16):
of a jury and then saying in a few years,
this guy, he's gonna be a big deal. No, he
had his stripes. Yeah, this this wholeso we see the
art competition continuing to be popular. In the nineteen Games,
which were in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. There were
more than one thousand pieces of art exhibited in the
(17:38):
Municipal Museum, something like eleven hundred and one of the
participants there was Francis Paul Landowski. He won the Olympic
gold medal for a sculpture of a boxer. He would
later go on to create the famous, the world famous
Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, which I
(18:01):
have not seen in person, but I definitely I want
to see, you know, it's on my bucket list. And
the good news is it's so big that it's pretty
easy to see. I can just kind of get to
Rio and look up exactly. So here's the question, what
happened to do this? You know, I mean it's not
lost obviously because the Olympic Committee themselves are are writing
(18:23):
about it. But this is certainly not of your average
Olympic fan would know much about. So what happened? But
where where did it go? Why did it fall out
of favor? World War two? As yeah, so many great
things of that time, you know, As you know, folks,
the Olympics were put on hold in because there was
(18:47):
a world war. Nearly all of the countries that would
ordinarily participate in the Olympics were now participating in war.
And when they came back after the close of the war,
the competitions had another problem new management. The new president
of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, was obsessed with amateurism.
(19:13):
He was a rigid supporter of amateur athletics and he
wanted Olympics, the Olympics to be pure. He thought they
were swayed by the weight of money, which is, you know,
a valid claim, but here's why it's spelled trouble for
the art competition. So he likes amateurs. He hates money
(19:34):
and nepotism, even though being president of the IOC is
kind of a nepotistic position. Uh, he says, Look, artists
have to sell their work to make a living, and
winning an Olympic medal could theoretically be a big advertisement
for that artists work. So you know what it reminds
(19:55):
me of. It's like when people win the Great British
Baking Show or the Great British Bake Off. There's not
a cash prize, you know, they win like a bespoke
crystal kind of cake platform. But honestly, the real prize
is just the accolades that comes along with it, and
most of the people that into the top three get
some kind I maybe even the top ten, or just
by participating in the show, they get a boost to
(20:17):
their baking career and probably get enough cloud that they
can open a successful bakery or you know, put out
a cookbook or something like that. Yeah. No, I want
to finish with the Brennage point because he's got He's
got a couple of a couple of pros and CODs here.
So he says, back in this post World War two
environment that if someone wins a medal for artistic expression,
(20:40):
then they're probably going to make bank off of it.
Later down the line, he thinks it's an unwelcome commodification
of the Olympics. But keep in mind that nowadays it's
not uncommon for Olympic athletes to get huge merchandise steals,
you know what I mean. So that also that that's
(21:02):
the that's very similar to the problem he said he
had with art competitions in the Olympics. Further, here's the
big con about it. He was a former Olympic artist.
He entered a piece of literature in the nineteen thirty
two Games. He didn't get a medal, he got an
(21:23):
honorable mention, and then later in the nineteen forty eight
Games he tried to shut down the whole art competition. Wow,
a little bitter maybe, Yeah, it seems so honorable mention,
that's that's that is enough to make someone have some
sour grapes. That's like worse than lebronze. It's like I've
always found that honorable mention this is such a borderline,
(21:47):
backhanded compliment of a category, you know, I think, So,
I mean, it's better than dishonorable mention, which I actually
not being mentioned at all. Perhaps I got a dishonorable
mention in uh in an art an essay competition once
and I had no regrets because I disagreed with the
premise of the competition. Do you remember the Invent America program?
(22:08):
M hmm. It was a thing that was popular when
I was a kid. I think it was like one
of those presidential you know, like the Presidential Fitness Challenge
or whatever. It was some kind of program for schools
and it was called Invent America, and you know, kids
would would make inventions and um, you know, you'd go
onto semifinals and all of that stuff, and I think
maybe ultimately you'd get some kind of patent. I can't
(22:30):
remember what the ultimate goal was, but I got an
honorable mention one year in the Invent American competition. I
quote unquote invented something I called the bright Night toilet light,
and it was a little clicky switch that would go
on the bottom of the toilet seat so when you
put it down, it would turn on a light so
that you wouldn't fall into the toilet. Um, those are
a thing though. Well, yeah, I guess that was ahead
(22:51):
of my time. But uh, I only thought that was
worthy of an honorable mention. So yeah, well, I mean,
I'm still very proud of my dishonorable mention because that
is malicious compliance at peak. Uh so so uh no,
bad blood of course. Yeah, I used to. I used
to do those I missed those competitions. I used to
do those kind of things all the time. Yeah. Yeah,
(23:15):
we all award ourselves prizes or are we gonna be like, yeah,
go ahead, because the three of us um and then
I don't know, we get like, I don't know other
people involved. I I feel like we can get a Vogue,
Obama and a wreath involved. Let's get everybody for ridiculous news,
ridiculous crime, ridiculous romance. Let's get them in the competition,
and let's decide ourselves, just just the three of us,
(23:38):
and you listen, you along, folks, Let's decide to not
give anyone a medal. Let's have everyone compete, and then
let's do them like the art competence the Art jury
did back then. All bronzes except for Strickland, who gets
the dishonorable mentionable and a dishonorable discharge. And we will
make it exclusively in the spoken word category. Why I
(24:01):
will I will die on this hill? Okay, all right,
and that's the title of your of your peace right.
I will die on this hill, I will do yes,
And indeed it's true. So this this, this fellow, you
know that kind of through a wrench in the works,
he essentially led to a serious discussion about the merits
(24:23):
of the art competition and whether or not they should
be you know, removed from the Games. Yeah. Eventually his
position won the day, and it was decided that art
competitions would be scrapped completely and they would be replaced
by an exhibition, a non competitive exhibition, and this eventually
(24:44):
became known as the Cultural Olympiad. And so there are
no more winners of Olympic medals in the field of
the arts for now, because, as we said, the Olympics
seemed to always be undergoing some sort of evolution. One
of the last medals awarded was a silver medal in
n to John Copley, a British guy, for his engraving
(25:09):
polo players. You could see there's a there's kind of
a trend on simple titles here, you know what I mean,
owed to sports polo players. The shot pushes the javelin thrower.
(25:31):
This is cool because he was seventy three years old
when he got this. This would have made him the
oldest medal winner in all of Olympic history. But that's interesting. Yeah,
but his victory didn't count. Well, okay, that that that
being said, it does occur to me though, that by
including the arts in this way, you are significantly broadening
(25:52):
the range of ages that could you know, successfully compete
in the quote unquote Olympics. Yeah, very young people could
theoretically win, as could quite elderly people. But this is
such a bummer to me. The one and fifty one
medals that had been awarded were retroactively stricken from the record,
(26:13):
so they don't This is important because it doesn't count
for a country's total number of medals overall, which is
a bummer. We learned about this thanks to Joseph Stromberg
over at the Smithsonian Big fans of the Smithsonian. So
this competition goes to the wayside in nineteen forty nine
(26:34):
because the IOC says, all right, all these art contestants
are professional artists, so this doesn't reflect what we see
as the amateur status of the Olympics. And that's something
(26:55):
again in the modern day I think most people would
disagree with, right, like the you can. I guess you
could say all figure skater is an amateur. Maybe, but
these folks spend all their lives working to perform, to
compete at the Olympics, and if it's the focus of
(27:17):
your life, I feel like it's kind of difficult to
call that person an amateur. I feel like it diminishes
the work they're putting in. What do you guys think
about that? Well, I could see them not counting towards
the metal count because it is such a different category.
I mean, it really is. It doesn't really reflect the
athletic competitive prowess of a country. It seems to sort
(27:39):
of not stack the deck necessarily, but skew the numbers
a little bit, you know. So I definitely I feel that.
But you know, I mean I think artists who won
them should still be able to say Olympic award, Olympic
medal winning artists, you know. Yeah, And art is also
you know, to our point about subjectivity. This art competition
didn't have the same quantitative metrics you could lean on,
(28:04):
right if you're measuring four hundred yard dash or something,
you can say, hey, this person finished first, and we
know that because we looked at the time. You can't
say this person finished fifth, but we're giving them the
gold medal because there's just something beautiful about the way
they run there like a gazelle, and aesthetically they're the winner.
(28:27):
That doesn't happen in the world of sports. And yeah,
to your point, like, I can see how it wouldn't
count for the medals for that reason, but I don't
think you should strike them from the record, remove them
from history. Also, look, we started trying to look for
some pieces, some examples of these works of art, and
(28:49):
we found that a lot of the Olympic medal winning
works have been lost to history. You can see the
architectural projects they were getting medals for things like best
town Planning basically. So it's tougher to get rid of
some of that stuff than it is to say, lose
(29:10):
a plaque or an engraving uha, or a medallion or
a medallion. God, do you know what, I bet somebody
has lost their Olympic medal. I bet somebody want it
and then lost it. Right, A lot of people probably have, yeah,
like a championship ring. But up maybe it's like it's
it's some pawn shop somewhere, you know, just floating right.
(29:31):
Who knows there was some Olympian fell on hot times especially,
but you're you're an amateur, so it's not gonna paid
any money to do this. That's a good point. It
is all about the the actual you know, artifact, the
Olympic medal itself, which obviously carries some value or some
some weight in terms of monetary you know, exchange. Right.
(29:52):
But I could see someone perhaps uh, you know, hawking
their Olympic medal because things didn't work out. Yeah, I
can see that. I mean, you know, O. J. Simpson
got in hot water when he had to get some
of his trophies back, right, some of his accolades. Uh.
And this this could happen with artists in this environment
(30:13):
as well. We know you can still see some of
these architectural projects. The Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam designed by
an architect named Jan Wiles. He got the Olympic gold in.
The Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale was designed by John
Russell Pope. He got the silver in nineteen thirty two.
(30:35):
Now he's best known for the Jefferson Memorial. And then
there's also Richard Honwyers who got the bronze at the
nineteen thirty two Olympics for the Olympic Stadium. So we
see multiple people got an Olympic medal in architecture for
designing the Olympic Stadium. I think that's your path to victory. Yeah,
(30:57):
it would, it would definitely seem so. So fast forward
just a little bit to the nineteen forty eight Games
in London, which um boasted the last, the very last
of the Olympic art medals. Finland seemed to lead the
charge here with two gold medals, one silver and one bronze.
(31:18):
And then, as we already said, it went the way
of non competitive you know games adjacent exhibitions. Um. And
that's still the case today, yeah, yeah, still Now there
are art competitions in some form associated with the Olympics.
Starting in two thousand four and going forward, the IOC
(31:40):
has routinely held what they call a Sport and Art
contest leading up to the Summer Games. For example, for
the two thousand twelve contests, people sent in sculptures and
graphic works on the following theme sport and the Olympic
values of excellence, friendship and respect. They don't get medals,
(32:01):
but they do get cash prizes, and if you are
a crowd favorite or a judge's favorite, then your work
gets displayed in London during the Games. So it's something nice. Yeah. Again,
it just contributes to raising the profile of an artist
and leading to perhaps more monetary success down the road
because they become a little bit more of a hot commodity.
(32:24):
But I would argue maybe it's sort of the equivalent
of winning one of those like postage stamp illustration contests.
You know, what's your what's your cool? But is it
making superstar artists? You know? I would argue maybe now,
like yeah, you know, and we'd have to be more connected,
I think, to the international art world to understand, you know,
(32:48):
who is the boss Scott here, who is the war
hal and so on. But we do know a little
bit more. We found some extra effects. Our buddy Jeff
found some things that he just really wanted us to mention. First,
the Olympic Game art competitions had a street name Pentathlon
of the Muses. Oh my gosh, Yeah, that's fun. I
(33:12):
like that because you know, full circle. Uh. The Olympics,
in their original incarnation and as they originally intended, were
a celebration of the gods and uh, you know the
muses are an important part of that pantheon. Yeah, and
then there's there's another one here, uh, the nineteen thirty
six Games. There's a story that Jedi won't tell you.
(33:34):
The government of Germany said they should add a film
contest to ZIP Pentathlon. And already by thirty six you
could tell that you're kind of had a bad vibe
about German film and propaganda. So they said no, no, sorry, guys,
that's a bridge too far. And that's not a ding
on all the awesome German films of the early nineteen hundreds.
(33:57):
I'm just wondering if they were like, I know, you
guys have a weird vibe. I feel like you're going
to release some strange films not too long from now,
so we'll skip it. That's just me speculating, you know.
But nol could they Okay, if they couldn't get medals,
but they could get cash prizes. What did they do
(34:18):
with the art when they were done, Well, they were
allowed to sell their works. They weren't auctioned in the exhibition.
This wasn't like a bidding situation, but they were allowed
to then remove their pieces from the exhibit and sell
them independently. Nice. Yeah, at least for a time, And
this was kind of controversial. The most successful Olympic artist
(34:40):
was a painter from Luxembourg, Jean Jacobi, and he got
two gold medals over the course of his career as
an Olympic artist. You could also, this is an interesting thing.
I didn't know, you could also submit works of art
in multiple iterations. Not just like I'm not saying you
could submit a piece of music and then also submit
(35:04):
and engraving. I'm saying you could submit several works of
art to the same category. So it's theoretically possible to
do a full sweep. The gold medal goes to Max,
the bronze medal goes to Max. After intense debate, the
silver medal goes to Max. You know what I mean.
That is still in the game, That seems because and
(35:26):
there and all of his things are called the sport
of run, which is very in line with those titles.
I don't know, like nowadays, I still love all the
artistic expression associated with especially the opening events for the Olympics,
like the two thousand eight Olympics in China. Man Chef Kiss,
(35:47):
that was amazing, right, and I hope that that stuff
continues in the future, and I hope maybe we can
lend some podcasts to the Olympics. And you know, I
mean even people that are necessarily into the sporting aspect
of the Olympics typically tune in for the opening ceremonies
because there's such a you know, combination of art, music,
(36:09):
and science. Remember the cloud seating thing that you know,
So that really is to me a perfect kind of
middle ground where it really is still highlighting and uh,
you know, glorifying the arts, but again it's more of
a presentation. It's more of a theatrical display rather than
something that that needs to be judged. Well, I do
(36:30):
want to kind of throw this out there, guys, because
there is still some artistic competitions in the Olympics. I
mean they are athletic artistic. Are you talking about curling? No, no, no,
curling is not curling has a score based thing. But
you're skating. Yeah, So we got figure skating, We got
ice dancing as well, Olympics. I got a couple of
Summer Olympics ones for us. We have equestrian horse dancing.
(36:53):
Well that's dressage is a sub Yeah, we got artistic swimming.
Is that like synchronized. Yeah, it's not called synchronized any longer.
It's called not artistic, I believe. Uh, there's rhythmatic rhythmatic gymnastics.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. And here's
the one I had forgotten about. There is now one
(37:13):
called breaking, like break dancing. It's funny that you mentioned
these maximum I'm glad that you did, because these are
also somewhat subjective in the panel of judges. Hold up
like a number, you know, that is a there's a
there's a scale, you know, I guess one to ten
(37:34):
or whatever. But I think also you get extra points,
you know, you have to you want to land a
certain number of these tricks, you know, and that really
affects your score. I mean, the beauty of it all,
and the music and the costumes and all. I guess
you know it's contributed that a little bit. But I mean,
you're more likely to win if you land a bunch
of like, you know, triple axles or whatever, these like
(37:56):
really hard to pull off tricks are Yeah. And then also,
I mean, maybe maybe it's better to say that the
arts competitions were not kinesthetic in nature. So even these
subjective uh performances or these subjective physical competitions are kind
of aesthetic. They are people moving their bodies in space.
(38:18):
Uh and this or horse or horse, yeah, or a
really precise horse who I think is probably traumatized. I'm
just gonna be honest, because that's not how horses normally walk.
It's funny you bring up pressage because that became a
running joke in uh Stuff they Don't Want you to
Know show we recorded recently. I don't know why what
(38:40):
about like like like like the what is the hobbies
of failed dictators? Something like? Well, I know, when Romney
was running for president back in twelve, The Daily Show
caught on the fact that he had adressage horse and
they had a lot of fun with that. Yeah, the
Daily Show, And shout out to John Stewart Man. You know, hey,
(39:00):
that guy. That guy deserves the Nobel Prize of some sort.
And we hope that you enjoyed this episode, folks. No,
this is something we asked at the end of another
Olympics episode. What are some sports you think should be
included in the Olympics that have yet to be included?
What are some sports you believe should come back We
can't wait to hear your thoughts. Find us on that
(39:21):
Facebook page mentioned Ridiculous Historians. Thanks as always to our
super producer Max Max. You are known curling enthusiasts, so
I imagine that would be your Olympic sport of choice
were you to compete. I'm gonna say that if I
were competing the Olympics, I would go with breaking because
back in the day it was actually pretty good at it. Nol.
(39:43):
What about you if you were competing in an Olympic sport? Uh,
finger skateboarding? Nice? Nice? Yeah, the skateboarding of kings. So
let's see who else thinks to Thanks to you, sir,
Thanks to Eve's Jeff Coats, Thanks to oh Alex Williams
who composed this Olympic metal worthy track. Indeed, Christopher rosciotis
(40:06):
here in spirit the quister. All the above, everyone our
Olympic Committee are rogues. Gallery of Ridiculous Historians. We'll see
you next time. Focus For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(40:27):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Who's that running towards the
finish line? Why it's our super producer, Mr Max Williams.
He goes, he's like a blur, He's like a flash,
like a rocket, and I'm painting the whole thing. Is
that go? Real? Real gold medal material? Almost said cold
(00:50):
war material, but that's a different episode. I'm dead your
knowl And today, ma'am, we're gonna talk about the Olympics
with some help from our research associate Jeff, but not
in a way that most people might think. Now you
might have seen the title of this episode Olympic Visual Arts,
and you might have pictured various Olympic mascots are branding,
(01:14):
you know, the rings or what is his name? Is
he a little guy for the Atlanta Olympics. Is now
quite a collectible little fella. He kind of looks like
a like a tear drop for something. It looks like
you should be a mascot for like a water company
or something. You know, yeah, I could go with water company.
Maybe also an electric company, because sometimes blue is electricity
(01:34):
and mask in the land of mascots. You know, it's
it's funny because back, uh, not too long ago, we
did an episode about former Olympic sports, Olympic sports of yesteryear,
and it might surprise some of our fellow ridiculous historians
to know that art used to be in the Olympics.
That's right, folks, a rt art, not art. Garf uncle,
(01:58):
We're not gonna plot twist you that way. No, we're
not talking about Paul Simon either, nor are we talking
about Olympic mascot art. We are talking about art as
a sport sort of kind of per se. Yeah. Yeah.
This comes to us in large part thanks to the
work of Richard Stanton, the author of a book called
(02:19):
The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions. Richard says, I first filmed
out about it reading a history book when I came
across a little comment about Olympic art competitions, and I said,
what competitions. This sparked his curiosity, piqued his interest, and
so he wrote the first and as far as we know,
(02:39):
only English language book on the subject of Olympic art competitions. Right,
some of the research we we dug through for this
had Stanton digging doing some digging himself through boxes of
records in the International Olympic Committee archives in Switzerland. And
as everyone knows this with have very poor penmanship. It's
(03:02):
the hallmark of of the country. Uh. Maybe that's not
entirely true, but apparently some of these were kind of
hard to read and did require a little bit of
detective work and sort of piecing together the forgotten history
of Olympic art competitions. Yeah, and this all goes back
to an aristocrat, Baron de Cobalting. Uh. This guy was
(03:25):
the founder of the International Olympic Committee and the modern
Olympic Games as we know them today. And if he
asked the Baron, he would say, look, one of the
big important pieces of the Olympics, in my vision, is
an art competition. Because he was consumed with this idea,
this vision of what defined a true Olympian, and to him,
(03:49):
a true Olympian is not just someone who could lift
heavy weights or run very quickly or swim like a fish. No,
they also were skilled in the classics, in music and literature.
He thought the Olympics would be incomplete if they did
not have some aspect of the arts. Yeah, because we
kind of forget sometimes that the Olympics, in their original
(04:14):
incarnation were meant to be a celebration of of the muse,
you know, of all things creative, you know, dating back
to ancient Greece, arts at sports were kind of considered
another art form in and and of itself, celebrating the artistic
expression of the human body itself. Yeah. Yeah, and I
(04:34):
see a flex in there, Max. That's that's nice. Uh.
I didn't know you were bringing guns to the show,
but never don't bring don't bring a knife to the
gun show. You always got to bring guns, right or
the fantastic restaurant here in Atlanta guns show. The chefs
have their own knives, so you don't need to bring them. Yeah.
(04:58):
That was an awkward moment for me, but still a
great night. So the guy the baron, right, he says,
I'm not making this up out of whole cloth. I'm
not coming from a vacuum here. This is something that
calls back to the ancient days of the Olympics. As
you mentioned, nol and I want there to be this
(05:19):
strong connection between the athletes, the artist, and the spectators.
So let's have art be part of the competitions. Uh,
he said, I mean he talks about regaining the glory
of the Olympics, right becoming bringing it back to life,
back to reality, and he sees the fine arts combining
(05:42):
harmoniously with the Games. This came up at the Olympic
Congress in nineteen o six, but they said, you know,
we don't have enough time this iteration. The Olympic Congress
of nineteen o six was planning the eight Games in
London and they said, look, Barren, we got your back,
(06:02):
but we might have to kick the can down the
road a bit here. And kicked the can they did
down the road a handful of years to the nineteen
twelve Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. And you know, as
is the case, I think aren't X Games type sports
now incorporated into the Olympics. There's I know that there are.
(06:24):
They're always shake ups that get proposed, and sometimes these
sports or changes to existing sports are more welcome than others.
Like I think we were talking about fair with Max
confirming that skateboarding is one but not all X Games. Right. Yeah,
it's like some I can't remember off the top of
(06:45):
my head, but I think they just added in park
but for a while they didn't have half pipe, even
though they had half pipe snowboarding in the Winter Olympics.
I mean, my personal favorite sport, baseball, just got added
back in with the most previous Olympics after being out
for like two decades. Isn't constant flux what sports are in?
What or not? Like obviously, like track and field is in.
(07:07):
Like guys running fast and people swimming far, those are
always in, but they change around a lot. Yeah, And
such was the case with figuring out how to introduce
art into the Olympic Games. So they kind of whittled
it down to five categories, which were architecture, music, painting,
literature and sculpture. And then of course they were later
(07:30):
subdivided even further into things like drama for literature and
um epic, which I guess would be like poetry, epic
poetry or lyric literature. I imagine that a sort of song, yeah,
or spoken word there were I saw the there was
an Olympic, an Olympic event held in Canada, and one
(07:50):
of the opening ceremonies a few years ago was this
just tremendously well done spoken word poem. And I know
spoken word gets a bad rap and folks. Yes, I'm
the first to say that eight of it might be
Ah swinging a miss for a lot of people, but
that other is life changing level good. And this, this
(08:12):
is a remnant of that idea, that attachment to the arts.
They also started dividing music into orchestral and instrumental, solo
and chorus singing or chorl And they also started looking
into ways to separate visual arts paintings from graphic arts,
drawings from paintings. This one surprised me. For sculpture, they
(08:37):
didn't just say statues are different from reliefs. They also said,
let's count medallion's why not? Maybe that's maybe you just
made the best medallion. Conflict of interest though, right, perhaps
what happens when a competitor makes a gold medal as
their submission. That's very meta and it's funny because, I
mean you could probably start to see where this becomes
(09:01):
difficult to judge, I mean, in competitions, you know, exclusively
for the arts, singing, music, literature, etcetera. It's not really
a point system, you know, I mean, it's very subjective.
So whereas sports, you know, are measured in measurable things
like yards, ran or or time you know, achieved you
(09:21):
know for a certain length, or points scored in a
particular game that has like a standardized scoring system. That's
not the case with painting, unless you're just doing speed painting.
It's like who finishes first or whatever. It is much
more of a subjective taste based kind of judging. Yeah. Yeah,
And that's why, in certain circumstances, competitors might not even
(09:45):
get a medal. If the judges looked around and they
were unable to come to a consensus on their subjective
opinions about a work of art, they might only award
a bronze medal. And that's you know, that's very distinct
from the way the rest of the Olympic events would go.
(10:05):
As the kids say, they might be these were all
pretty mid, so we'll just give out a bronze. Yeah,
but good hustle everybody, and nice medallion. Also, your plaque
is good. I just can't choose bronze medals for all.
There were thirty three people who participated in the very
(10:28):
first Olympic art competition for the Modern Olympics in nineteen twelve,
and that during the nineteen twelve competition, there was a
gold medal awarded in all of the five categories. We're
getting this research directly from the Olympic Olympics dot com,
so they do quite a good job of of, you know,
(10:50):
laying out all of the history of this very unusual
period in the Olympic Games. Yeah, shout out to the
author that Indra shasta Kova. So if you look at
their history here, you'll see that there were some rules
for submissions, and if you've ever been in a writing competition,
or you've ever submitted to a journal or something like that,
(11:14):
then you'll recognize some of this. You might also run
into it. In some gallery competitions, judges could only score
works that had never been exhibited anywhere else, and they
have also had to be dedicated to sports, so there's
a theme to it. The baron himself, by the way,
he participated in a literature competition under a pseudonym and
(11:39):
his piece won a gold medal. Corruption. That's a little suspicious.
Did you say the name of I love it It's
to Sport, which, again, like I don't want to judge
it just by the title. I haven't read it yet.
Maybe it's amazing, but ow to Sport sounds a little
(12:01):
on the nose for the gold medal. I'd love to
see who else entered the literature competition. Correct, So fun
fact from the nineteen twelve Games UM the United States entry,
Walter Winnens won the win. Winnens won UH an Olympic
gold medal in shooting four years prior. But then later
(12:24):
I guess you had like a little side hustle as
a sculptor. He became the Olympic gold medalist in that
category in sculpture UH in Sweden. He'd also won an
Olympic medal in shooting that same Games. Yeah, and then
there is one other guy who won medals in art
(12:44):
and sports, and that is Alfred Hajos from Hungary two
gold medals in Athens in eighteen six and a few
years later won the silver medal in architecture. Look, we
know that most people hearing this today do not associate
the athletic feats of the Olympics with the aesthetic feats
(13:07):
of the art world. And back in Antwerp in the
nineteen twenties, the situation was kind of similar. The art
competition didn't get a lot of press, didn't get a
lot of attention, It didn't draw a ton of crowds.
But this changed just a few years later when the
Olympics went to Paris in nineteen. Well, it's also I mean,
(13:28):
it's not no, no, no shade on on art or whatever,
but it's not exactly the most captivating thing to exhibits
in terms of a spectator. Um, you know, sport like
these are obviously things that are presented and then displayed
in some sort of gallery type situation, at least in
terms of the visual arts. I don't know that we
(13:49):
have any information about how we're the were the poems
and the literature pieces read aloud by the writers like
wild fighting, Oh no, weld swordfighting okay? On top uh?
Galloping steeds, yes, yes, uh? And and uh the pages
they were reading would be lit on fire. Uh No,
(14:12):
we're just making up a really interesting competition. But this
reminds me I want to shout out one of our uh,
one of our friends on our Facebook page, ridiculous historians.
Robin w hipped us to a real sport called chess boxing.
You alternate rounds of rapid chess and rounds of boxing
until someone wins in one of those categories. Oh that's
(14:37):
so funny. I never knew that there's a Woo Tank
Clan song called The Mystery of Chess Boxing, and um,
I never knew what that was referring to until now.
They don't actually say that in the in the in
the lyrics at all, but that is the name of
one of my favorite tracks off of the thirty six
Chambers record. Nice. Yeah, And we don't know if they're
(15:00):
talking about I think they're talking about applying a martial
arts mentality to chess. I don't think they're talking about
alternating rounds. But maybe they are connected, you know, maybe
secretly some members of the Wu Tang clan our world
class chess boxers. If so, we'd love to see a clip.
Of course it's it's named after a kung fu film
(15:23):
Hong Kong film from nineteen seventy nine directed by Joseph
Koo called The Mystery of Chess Boxing. You know that
the Wu Tang clan loved some some kung fu pictures.
Of course, who doesn't I love kung fu movies as well.
You know, I'd say I love kung fu movies as
much as uh. The attendance of the Olympics in Paris,
(15:45):
loved the art competition almost two hundred people submitted works
of art, including three Soviet artists, and this was interesting
because at the time the Soviet Union was not participating
in the Olympics. There was some geopolitical tension. The jury, right,
the judges for the art competition in the Paris Games
(16:09):
was also um pretty creme de la creme. They were
pretty posh. The first woman to receive the Nobel Prize
in literature was there that Sweden's Selma lager Loaf. And
then a famous Russian composer, the one and only Igor Stravinsky.
Oh yeah, is Rights of Spring. Uh an episode unto
itself in terms of the premiere of that piece that
(16:31):
I believe caused some manner of riots because the music
was just so stark and intense and in your face
and you know, for lack of a better term, at
the time modern, you know, it just wasn't the classical
music was very formal and and meant to kind of
stick to the hits and sort of the forms of
of classical composers in history. And Stravinsky, with this kind
(16:55):
of atonal, clashy, kind of very you know, storm and
drawn kind of vibes, really turned that whole thing on
his head, so very interesting to see. I'm not this
must have been after he of course, this would have
been after he was already established and kind of you know,
got his bona fides and was no longer like this
iconoclastic figure. Yeah, they weren't putting him as a member
(17:16):
of a jury and then saying in a few years,
this guy, he's gonna be a big deal. No, he
had his stripes. Yeah, this this wholeso we see the
art competition continuing to be popular. In the nineteen Games,
which were in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. There were
more than one thousand pieces of art exhibited in the
(17:38):
Municipal Museum, something like eleven hundred and one of the
participants there was Francis Paul Landowski. He won the Olympic
gold medal for a sculpture of a boxer. He would
later go on to create the famous, the world famous
Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, which I
(18:01):
have not seen in person, but I definitely I want
to see, you know, it's on my bucket list. And
the good news is it's so big that it's pretty
easy to see. I can just kind of get to
Rio and look up exactly. So here's the question, what
happened to do this? You know, I mean it's not
lost obviously because the Olympic Committee themselves are are writing
(18:23):
about it. But this is certainly not of your average
Olympic fan would know much about. So what happened? But
where where did it go? Why did it fall out
of favor? World War two? As yeah, so many great
things of that time, you know, As you know, folks,
the Olympics were put on hold in because there was
(18:47):
a world war. Nearly all of the countries that would
ordinarily participate in the Olympics were now participating in war.
And when they came back after the close of the war,
the competitions had another problem new management. The new president
of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, was obsessed with amateurism.
(19:13):
He was a rigid supporter of amateur athletics and he
wanted Olympics, the Olympics to be pure. He thought they
were swayed by the weight of money, which is, you know,
a valid claim, but here's why it's spelled trouble for
the art competition. So he likes amateurs. He hates money
(19:34):
and nepotism, even though being president of the IOC is
kind of a nepotistic position. Uh, he says, Look, artists
have to sell their work to make a living, and
winning an Olympic medal could theoretically be a big advertisement
for that artists work. So you know what it reminds
(19:55):
me of. It's like when people win the Great British
Baking Show or the Great British Bake Off. There's not
a cash prize, you know, they win like a bespoke
crystal kind of cake platform. But honestly, the real prize
is just the accolades that comes along with it, and
most of the people that into the top three get
some kind I maybe even the top ten, or just
by participating in the show, they get a boost to
(20:17):
their baking career and probably get enough cloud that they
can open a successful bakery or you know, put out
a cookbook or something like that. Yeah. No, I want
to finish with the Brennage point because he's got He's
got a couple of a couple of pros and CODs here.
So he says, back in this post World War two
environment that if someone wins a medal for artistic expression,
(20:40):
then they're probably going to make bank off of it.
Later down the line, he thinks it's an unwelcome commodification
of the Olympics. But keep in mind that nowadays it's
not uncommon for Olympic athletes to get huge merchandise steals,
you know what I mean. So that also that that's
(21:02):
the that's very similar to the problem he said he
had with art competitions in the Olympics. Further, here's the
big con about it. He was a former Olympic artist.
He entered a piece of literature in the nineteen thirty
two Games. He didn't get a medal, he got an
(21:23):
honorable mention, and then later in the nineteen forty eight
Games he tried to shut down the whole art competition. Wow,
a little bitter maybe, Yeah, it seems so honorable mention,
that's that's that is enough to make someone have some
sour grapes. That's like worse than lebronze. It's like I've
always found that honorable mention this is such a borderline,
(21:47):
backhanded compliment of a category, you know, I think, So,
I mean, it's better than dishonorable mention, which I actually
not being mentioned at all. Perhaps I got a dishonorable
mention in uh in an art an essay competition once
and I had no regrets because I disagreed with the
premise of the competition. Do you remember the Invent America program?
(22:08):
M hmm. It was a thing that was popular when
I was a kid. I think it was like one
of those presidential you know, like the Presidential Fitness Challenge
or whatever. It was some kind of program for schools
and it was called Invent America, and you know, kids
would would make inventions and um, you know, you'd go
onto semifinals and all of that stuff, and I think
maybe ultimately you'd get some kind of patent. I can't
(22:30):
remember what the ultimate goal was, but I got an
honorable mention one year in the Invent American competition. I
quote unquote invented something I called the bright Night toilet light,
and it was a little clicky switch that would go
on the bottom of the toilet seat so when you
put it down, it would turn on a light so
that you wouldn't fall into the toilet. Um, those are
a thing though. Well, yeah, I guess that was ahead
(22:51):
of my time. But uh, I only thought that was
worthy of an honorable mention. So yeah, well, I mean,
I'm still very proud of my dishonorable mention because that
is malicious compliance at peak. Uh so so uh no,
bad blood of course. Yeah, I used to. I used
to do those I missed those competitions. I used to
do those kind of things all the time. Yeah. Yeah,
(23:15):
we all award ourselves prizes or are we gonna be like, yeah,
go ahead, because the three of us um and then
I don't know, we get like, I don't know other
people involved. I I feel like we can get a Vogue,
Obama and a wreath involved. Let's get everybody for ridiculous news,
ridiculous crime, ridiculous romance. Let's get them in the competition,
and let's decide ourselves, just just the three of us,
(23:38):
and you listen, you along, folks, Let's decide to not
give anyone a medal. Let's have everyone compete, and then
let's do them like the art competence the Art jury
did back then. All bronzes except for Strickland, who gets
the dishonorable mentionable and a dishonorable discharge. And we will
make it exclusively in the spoken word category. Why I
(24:01):
will I will die on this hill? Okay, all right,
and that's the title of your of your peace right.
I will die on this hill, I will do yes,
And indeed it's true. So this this, this fellow, you
know that kind of through a wrench in the works,
he essentially led to a serious discussion about the merits
(24:23):
of the art competition and whether or not they should
be you know, removed from the Games. Yeah. Eventually his
position won the day, and it was decided that art
competitions would be scrapped completely and they would be replaced
by an exhibition, a non competitive exhibition, and this eventually
(24:44):
became known as the Cultural Olympiad. And so there are
no more winners of Olympic medals in the field of
the arts for now, because, as we said, the Olympics
seemed to always be undergoing some sort of evolution. One
of the last medals awarded was a silver medal in
n to John Copley, a British guy, for his engraving
(25:09):
polo players. You could see there's a there's kind of
a trend on simple titles here, you know what I mean,
owed to sports polo players. The shot pushes the javelin thrower.
(25:31):
This is cool because he was seventy three years old
when he got this. This would have made him the
oldest medal winner in all of Olympic history. But that's interesting. Yeah,
but his victory didn't count. Well, okay, that that that
being said, it does occur to me though, that by
including the arts in this way, you are significantly broadening
(25:52):
the range of ages that could you know, successfully compete
in the quote unquote Olympics. Yeah, very young people could
theoretically win, as could quite elderly people. But this is
such a bummer to me. The one and fifty one
medals that had been awarded were retroactively stricken from the record,
(26:13):
so they don't This is important because it doesn't count
for a country's total number of medals overall, which is
a bummer. We learned about this thanks to Joseph Stromberg
over at the Smithsonian Big fans of the Smithsonian. So
this competition goes to the wayside in nineteen forty nine
(26:34):
because the IOC says, all right, all these art contestants
are professional artists, so this doesn't reflect what we see
as the amateur status of the Olympics. And that's something
(26:55):
again in the modern day I think most people would
disagree with, right, like the you can. I guess you
could say all figure skater is an amateur. Maybe, but
these folks spend all their lives working to perform, to
compete at the Olympics, and if it's the focus of
(27:17):
your life, I feel like it's kind of difficult to
call that person an amateur. I feel like it diminishes
the work they're putting in. What do you guys think
about that? Well, I could see them not counting towards
the metal count because it is such a different category.
I mean, it really is. It doesn't really reflect the
athletic competitive prowess of a country. It seems to sort
(27:39):
of not stack the deck necessarily, but skew the numbers
a little bit, you know. So I definitely I feel that.
But you know, I mean I think artists who won
them should still be able to say Olympic award, Olympic
medal winning artists, you know. Yeah, And art is also
you know, to our point about subjectivity. This art competition
didn't have the same quantitative metrics you could lean on,
(28:04):
right if you're measuring four hundred yard dash or something,
you can say, hey, this person finished first, and we
know that because we looked at the time. You can't
say this person finished fifth, but we're giving them the
gold medal because there's just something beautiful about the way
they run there like a gazelle, and aesthetically they're the winner.
(28:27):
That doesn't happen in the world of sports. And yeah,
to your point, like, I can see how it wouldn't
count for the medals for that reason, but I don't
think you should strike them from the record, remove them
from history. Also, look, we started trying to look for
some pieces, some examples of these works of art, and
(28:49):
we found that a lot of the Olympic medal winning
works have been lost to history. You can see the
architectural projects they were getting medals for things like best
town Planning basically. So it's tougher to get rid of
some of that stuff than it is to say, lose
(29:10):
a plaque or an engraving uha, or a medallion or
a medallion. God, do you know what, I bet somebody
has lost their Olympic medal. I bet somebody want it
and then lost it. Right, A lot of people probably have, yeah,
like a championship ring. But up maybe it's like it's
it's some pawn shop somewhere, you know, just floating right.
(29:31):
Who knows there was some Olympian fell on hot times especially,
but you're you're an amateur, so it's not gonna paid
any money to do this. That's a good point. It
is all about the the actual you know, artifact, the
Olympic medal itself, which obviously carries some value or some
some weight in terms of monetary you know, exchange. Right.
(29:52):
But I could see someone perhaps uh, you know, hawking
their Olympic medal because things didn't work out. Yeah, I
can see that. I mean, you know, O. J. Simpson
got in hot water when he had to get some
of his trophies back, right, some of his accolades. Uh.
And this this could happen with artists in this environment
(30:13):
as well. We know you can still see some of
these architectural projects. The Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam designed by
an architect named Jan Wiles. He got the Olympic gold in.
The Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale was designed by John
Russell Pope. He got the silver in nineteen thirty two.
(30:35):
Now he's best known for the Jefferson Memorial. And then
there's also Richard Honwyers who got the bronze at the
nineteen thirty two Olympics for the Olympic Stadium. So we
see multiple people got an Olympic medal in architecture for
designing the Olympic Stadium. I think that's your path to victory. Yeah,
(30:57):
it would, it would definitely seem so. So fast forward
just a little bit to the nineteen forty eight Games
in London, which um boasted the last, the very last
of the Olympic art medals. Finland seemed to lead the
charge here with two gold medals, one silver and one bronze.
(31:18):
And then, as we already said, it went the way
of non competitive you know games adjacent exhibitions. Um. And
that's still the case today, yeah, yeah, still Now there
are art competitions in some form associated with the Olympics.
Starting in two thousand four and going forward, the IOC
(31:40):
has routinely held what they call a Sport and Art
contest leading up to the Summer Games. For example, for
the two thousand twelve contests, people sent in sculptures and
graphic works on the following theme sport and the Olympic
values of excellence, friendship and respect. They don't get medals,
(32:01):
but they do get cash prizes, and if you are
a crowd favorite or a judge's favorite, then your work
gets displayed in London during the Games. So it's something nice. Yeah. Again,
it just contributes to raising the profile of an artist
and leading to perhaps more monetary success down the road
because they become a little bit more of a hot commodity.
(32:24):
But I would argue maybe it's sort of the equivalent
of winning one of those like postage stamp illustration contests.
You know, what's your what's your cool? But is it
making superstar artists? You know? I would argue maybe now,
like yeah, you know, and we'd have to be more connected,
I think, to the international art world to understand, you know,
(32:48):
who is the boss Scott here, who is the war
hal and so on. But we do know a little
bit more. We found some extra effects. Our buddy Jeff
found some things that he just really wanted us to mention. First,
the Olympic Game art competitions had a street name Pentathlon
of the Muses. Oh my gosh, Yeah, that's fun. I
(33:12):
like that because you know, full circle. Uh. The Olympics,
in their original incarnation and as they originally intended, were
a celebration of the gods and uh, you know the
muses are an important part of that pantheon. Yeah, and
then there's there's another one here, uh, the nineteen thirty
six Games. There's a story that Jedi won't tell you.
(33:34):
The government of Germany said they should add a film
contest to ZIP Pentathlon. And already by thirty six you
could tell that you're kind of had a bad vibe
about German film and propaganda. So they said no, no, sorry, guys,
that's a bridge too far. And that's not a ding
on all the awesome German films of the early nineteen hundreds.
(33:57):
I'm just wondering if they were like, I know, you
guys have a weird vibe. I feel like you're going
to release some strange films not too long from now,
so we'll skip it. That's just me speculating, you know.
But nol could they Okay, if they couldn't get medals,
but they could get cash prizes. What did they do
(34:18):
with the art when they were done, Well, they were
allowed to sell their works. They weren't auctioned in the exhibition.
This wasn't like a bidding situation, but they were allowed
to then remove their pieces from the exhibit and sell
them independently. Nice. Yeah, at least for a time, And
this was kind of controversial. The most successful Olympic artist
(34:40):
was a painter from Luxembourg, Jean Jacobi, and he got
two gold medals over the course of his career as
an Olympic artist. You could also, this is an interesting thing.
I didn't know, you could also submit works of art
in multiple iterations. Not just like I'm not saying you
could submit a piece of music and then also submit
(35:04):
and engraving. I'm saying you could submit several works of
art to the same category. So it's theoretically possible to
do a full sweep. The gold medal goes to Max,
the bronze medal goes to Max. After intense debate, the
silver medal goes to Max. You know what I mean.
That is still in the game, That seems because and
(35:26):
there and all of his things are called the sport
of run, which is very in line with those titles.
I don't know, like nowadays, I still love all the
artistic expression associated with especially the opening events for the Olympics,
like the two thousand eight Olympics in China. Man Chef Kiss,
(35:47):
that was amazing, right, and I hope that that stuff
continues in the future, and I hope maybe we can
lend some podcasts to the Olympics. And you know, I
mean even people that are necessarily into the sporting aspect
of the Olympics typically tune in for the opening ceremonies
because there's such a you know, combination of art, music,
(36:09):
and science. Remember the cloud seating thing that you know,
So that really is to me a perfect kind of
middle ground where it really is still highlighting and uh,
you know, glorifying the arts, but again it's more of
a presentation. It's more of a theatrical display rather than
something that that needs to be judged. Well, I do
(36:30):
want to kind of throw this out there, guys, because
there is still some artistic competitions in the Olympics. I
mean they are athletic artistic. Are you talking about curling? No, no, no,
curling is not curling has a score based thing. But
you're skating. Yeah, So we got figure skating, We got
ice dancing as well, Olympics. I got a couple of
Summer Olympics ones for us. We have equestrian horse dancing.
(36:53):
Well that's dressage is a sub Yeah, we got artistic swimming.
Is that like synchronized. Yeah, it's not called synchronized any longer.
It's called not artistic, I believe. Uh, there's rhythmatic rhythmatic gymnastics.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. And here's
the one I had forgotten about. There is now one
(37:13):
called breaking, like break dancing. It's funny that you mentioned
these maximum I'm glad that you did, because these are
also somewhat subjective in the panel of judges. Hold up
like a number, you know, that is a there's a
there's a scale, you know, I guess one to ten
(37:34):
or whatever. But I think also you get extra points,
you know, you have to you want to land a
certain number of these tricks, you know, and that really
affects your score. I mean, the beauty of it all,
and the music and the costumes and all. I guess
you know it's contributed that a little bit. But I mean,
you're more likely to win if you land a bunch
of like, you know, triple axles or whatever, these like
(37:56):
really hard to pull off tricks are Yeah. And then also,
I mean, maybe maybe it's better to say that the
arts competitions were not kinesthetic in nature. So even these
subjective uh performances or these subjective physical competitions are kind
of aesthetic. They are people moving their bodies in space.
(38:18):
Uh and this or horse or horse, yeah, or a
really precise horse who I think is probably traumatized. I'm
just gonna be honest, because that's not how horses normally walk.
It's funny you bring up pressage because that became a
running joke in uh Stuff they Don't Want you to
Know show we recorded recently. I don't know why what
(38:40):
about like like like like the what is the hobbies
of failed dictators? Something like? Well, I know, when Romney
was running for president back in twelve, The Daily Show
caught on the fact that he had adressage horse and
they had a lot of fun with that. Yeah, the
Daily Show, And shout out to John Stewart Man. You know, hey,
(39:00):
that guy. That guy deserves the Nobel Prize of some sort.
And we hope that you enjoyed this episode, folks. No,
this is something we asked at the end of another
Olympics episode. What are some sports you think should be
included in the Olympics that have yet to be included?
What are some sports you believe should come back We
can't wait to hear your thoughts. Find us on that
(39:21):
Facebook page mentioned Ridiculous Historians. Thanks as always to our
super producer Max Max. You are known curling enthusiasts, so
I imagine that would be your Olympic sport of choice
were you to compete. I'm gonna say that if I
were competing the Olympics, I would go with breaking because
back in the day it was actually pretty good at it. Nol.
(39:43):
What about you if you were competing in an Olympic sport? Uh,
finger skateboarding? Nice? Nice? Yeah, the skateboarding of kings. So
let's see who else thinks to Thanks to you, sir,
Thanks to Eve's Jeff Coats, Thanks to oh Alex Williams
who composed this Olympic metal worthy track. Indeed, Christopher rosciotis
(40:06):
here in spirit the quister. All the above, everyone our
Olympic Committee are rogues. Gallery of Ridiculous Historians. We'll see
you next time. Focus For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(40:27):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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