Sport and culture have long converged in the Olympic arena. The world’s largest public event, the Olympic Games are pillared on the principles of excellence, endeavour and understanding among nations – equally the dictum of culture and the arts. But the shape of Olympic arts is changing – moving with the new millennium into arguably its most exciting phase yet.
From their Athens launch in 1896 the modern Olympics have incorporated cultural activities in their staging, enriching the experience for participating individuals, host cities and spectators, while stoking the Olympic movement with increasing fervour.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French pedagogue and historian who officiated that Athens launch (and presided over the Games rebirth for the next three decades), prioritised culture from the outset. Two of his four defining goalposts for the Games and the Olympic movement are: creating “a four-yearly festival of the springtime of mankind”; and glorifying beauty by the “involvement of the philosophic arts in the Games”.
A believer that the twin fields were inextricable, he convened a Consultative Conference on Arts, Letters and Sport in Paris, 1906, to propose an immediate addition to the Games program – a series of competitions in architecture, sculpture, music, painting and literature that visibly fused athleticism and the arts.
Researcher Anne Popma explains these developments in her 2004 report on the Potential Impact of the 2010 Olympic Games on local arts and culture in the Sea-to-Sky Corridor, commissioned by Canada’s Whistler Arts Council.
“Entries had to be original works ‘directly inspired by sport’,” she reveals, “such contests henceforth to become an integral part of the celebration of each Olympiad. The first arts competitions were held in 1912 during the Stockholm Games, with medals awarded in five areas, the so-called ‘Pentathlon of Muses’. From then until the London Games in 1948, artists competed at the Olympic Games in much the same way athletes do today. At 7 summer Games during this period, 145 medals were awarded for Olympic arts competitions, including a gold medal in poetry to Coubertin for his poem Ode to Sport.”
But this strict amalgamation of arts and sport within competitive parameters didn’t endure. The restrictive criteria for artist contenders and other logistical difficulties saw culture shift into an Olympic side-seat, rather than continue to share the proverbial track. Arts and culture would continue to be a part of the Games, but as a mortar rather than an opposite number on the field. Artists would help give voice to the Games experience through their work – exhibitions and demonstrations to run alongside major sporting events in a Games program.
Over time, this was firmed into the Olympic Cultural Festivals we’re now familiar with – mandated by the International Olympic Committee, the Festivals contain a full program of cultural events usually kicking off well outside of a year before the main event.
Using this model, artists have greater freedom to communicate to a worldwide Olympic audience, and under a rare global spotlight (and more so than ever with the blossoming of broadcasting technologies), host cities are able to dress Olympic proceedings according to local traditions and ambitions – the athletic enterprise at their centre made distinctive itself through an authentic cultural personality. Festivals can be totally shaped by host organisers, leaving room for cities to be remembered long after Games have wrapped for the ‘show’ they put on and the flavour of their Olympic arts (or absence thereof).
Sydney’s 2000 effort exemplifies this – a cavalcade of native arts and culture orchestrated to perfection in multitudinous events.
However, even in these ultra visible millenial Games, most of the world’s eyeballs were focused on the Opening and Closing ceremonies – spectacular accomplishments to be sure, but only one component of what the city actually delivered in cultural programming.
This is arguably arts greatest battlefront with the contemporary Olympic phenomenon.
As Popma asserts in her primer for Vancouver 2010, “the problem is that, despite being tied to the most recognised symbol and the biggest sporting festival in the world, the arts at the Modern Olympic Games are one of the least known of international cultural festivals among art-world professionals and the general public. To a certain extent, the history of Olympic Arts Festivals is either lost or misrepresented in a multitude of Olympic books and media reports.’
Andy Miah and Beatriz Garcia, cultural policy researchers at the Universities of Abertay, Dundee and Glasgow respectively, concur, using the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics in the US State of Utah as case study.
“Few people identify the Olympic Games as a cultural festival, which has undermined the chances of host cities to portray themselves beyond the sporting events,” they conclude in The Olympics is not a Sporting Event!: Art and culture at the 2002 Winter Olympics.
They go on: “The professionalisation and commercialisation of sport, coupled with its media-magnetism means that cultural expression is pushed to the margins of international attention during the Olympic fortnight. It is for this reason, that Salt Lake provides a particularly interesting case in comparison to, for example, Atlanta 1996, where the arts programme passed unnoticed for many Olympic visitors. To its credit, the organisers of Salt Lake tried to challenge this by placing culture right in front of its visitors. As explained by Raymond T. Grant, artistic director of the Olympic arts program, the aim of the city cultural planners and the Games organising committee was ‘to ensure that, by the time Olympic tourists depart on their long journeys home, they will have a feeling that the Olympics does not just mean watching athletes’”.
It’s here, in Salt Lake’s example and beyond, that the next evolution of Olympics and the arts may well occur. Once playing alongside athletes in competition, then playing for complement just outside the Games spotlight, arts and culture within the Olympic experience are gradually coming into their own as a palpable force. It’s no longer about athleticism through art, but using culture and the arts to stimulate unity and renewal. Sporting contest and comraderie emerges out of the matrix, rather than being the stimuli.
Though the Torino(Turin), Beijing and Vancouver Games have yet to unfold, it’s in London 2012 that culture seems truly poised to elevate the Games, and the Olympic movement to new heights.
Central to London’s winning bid for the 2012 Games, was a pitch for dramatic urban and community renewal in the city’s east. Rather than adding to existing sporting or cultural infrastructure, London’s 2012 team made long-term societal betterment its focus, outlining an ambitious blueprint for developing a new Olympic Park in east London, to serve “as the catalyst for a thriving new inner city community.”
Says London’s Candidature File: “The new Olympic Park will transform one of the poorest areas in the United Kingdom into an urban and environmental showpiece, creating one of the biggest new community parklands in Europe for decades along with thousands of new jobs and affordable housing as a model for sustainable inner city renewal.” Organisers have planned a festival of world youth culture, staged along the waterways, bridges and streets of this revitalised hub, with street dance, fashion, music, design and urban sport displays resuscitating a once decaying locale.
The arrival of the Games will invariably spawn other urban renewal and revitalisation projects, as it has with other host cities, but rarely to such an extent. In the ‘age of anxiety’ the Games seem an increasingly reliable trigger for highly focused, collective bursts of optimism – vision, led by astute cultural mapmakers, that transforms into action, and ultimately, change.
The UK Institute For Public Policy Research produced a scoping study on the impact of a 2012 winning bid for London. After the Gold Rush: a sustainable Olympics for London found “if a London 2012 Olympics is to realise the IOC’s aspiration to place culture and education on an equal footing to sport then it will have to go beyond simply using culture as a marketing tool. A sustainable cultural legacy would represent an opportunity to build lasting links amongst a disparate cultural sector and foster new forms of partnership working with schools, organisations and individuals throughout the UK and overseas. If this is to be achieved, the whole of the sector will need to be engaged, including its disruptive fringes.’
The study concluded that, “the combination of culture and the Olympics represents a chance to learn and investigate ourselves as a nation, rather than just presenting a summary in an opening ceremony. If this is to be lasting, the use of cultural programming in the Games will have to contribute directly towards widening access to culture and participation in it and in so doing increase our ability to better understand ourselves and one another. Only if this is achieved could the Games be considered ‘culturally sustainable’”.
London’s bid for the Games fills out these parameters with confidence. No more exhibitions in a distant hall, or poems to immortalise an athlete’s personal glory. London 2012 is about living the moment, and paving the way for tomorrow – with the arts and culture showing the way.
In the aftermath of this month’s tragic bombings, it’s a welcome change at the podium, and the likely future of De Coubertin’s vision.
