Were artists ever considered athletes?

PEA RIDGE — Like most sports minded Americans, I managed to fit in some time watching the recently concluded London Olympic games.

Being an ardent fan of my own country, I was a little concerned that the United States was trailing China through much of the early going in the games.

As track coach, official and fan, I knew that the U.S. would most likely grab a whole bunch more medals in the track and field than would China, which is exactly what happened.

Both the U.S. and China were pretty much the class of the competition with the Russians and British battling it out to see who would take the third most medals (the Russians did). As it has since the games were reborn in 1896, America has been the odds on favorite to lead the pack in the Summer Olympic Games. The Winter Olympic Games are a different story.

The TV commentators were talking about all the medals the U.S. has won through all these competitions, and someone mentioned something that I had never heard of. Early in the modern Olympic movement, medals were awarded for artistic achievement.

Author Richard Stanton ran acorss this little known fact and researched it into a book called “The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions.” From 1912to 1952, the year I was born, 151 medals were awarded in a variety of artitistic endeavors. Stanton found the historical records that had been buried in a records warehouse with no one really knowing of their existence until the author sought them out.

The modern Olympic founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin wanted the arts to be as much a part of the Olympics as the athletic events. De Coubertin had a classical education which stressed that a true, well rounded person would be skilled in music, literature and art, as well as athletics.

The first Olympic art gold medal was awarded to Walter Winans, a previous Olympic gold medalist for sharp shooting. Winans won his 1912 gold medal for casting a small bronze horse and chariot. The various artists were to do works that wrote about or depicted the various venues of the games themselves.

When the Olympic movement really took hold in the 1920s and ’30s, the artistic part of the games became less and less important. Local audiences loved the exhibitions with crowds always packing the venues where the arts where shown or demonstrated. In fact, during the 1932 games in Los Angeles, 400,000 people toured the facilities hosting the arts.

World War II put everything on hold, and after that was over, an enemy of things artistic rose to power in the United Statesin the personage of Avery Brundage. Brundage was obsessed with the notion that none of the particiants in the Olympic games ever receive a penny for their efforts. He thought that was the best way to ensure the “purity” of the games.

Since artists sold art work for money, he considered that to be unwanted professionalism. When Brundage became president of the International Olympic Movement, he saw to it that art medals would cease to awarded after 1948.

Of course, with all the participants not receiving a penny for their efforts, the Olympic games made the overseers of the games very wealthy. Brundage lived and traveled very well with the money raised through holding the games, as did his fellow Olympic officials.

It was an American athlete, Steve Prefontaine, who finally brought down the hold elitists held over the games. Prefontaine was a top runner for the United States who didn’t mind speaking his mind about what he saw was the hypocrisy and selfishness exhibited by officials who wanted to keep the games pure.

Today, the best athletes in the world can compete in the Olympics. While the games award no money, lots of athletes stand to gain millions of dollars in endorsements and other similar contracts. There is no dishonor in that.