I rarely watch sports. The last Super Bowl I watched was in New Orleans, not the one in 2025, but the one in 1986, when the Bears won. Lately, bingeing Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive has sparked a renewed interest in Formula 1 for me, but generally, I don’t have time for sports unless I am involved in them. There is already too much to do. But I do enjoy the Winter Olympics. I guess I like my sports fast; with a life defined by exile, I can always think of a reason to flee.
Watching the Olympics over the past two weeks, I remembered that my father’s professor at the Vienna Art Academy, Herbert Dimmel, had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics — Hitler’s notorious showcase — with his painting The Olympic Garden. That painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music competitions were part of the modern Olympics is now pretty well known, largely from lists of absurd Olympic medals from the early days, like live pigeon shooting, firefighting, or pistol dueling with wax bullets. But it wasn’t like that at all; that artistic competitions survived even Hitler’s bald-faced subjugation of aesthetics to ideology underscores how deeply the format was embedded in Olympic structure. Art competitions last ran at the 1948 London Games. The IOC dropped them in 1954, citing, among other reasons, the professional status of most competing artists. A generation later, the IOC abandoned the amateur requirement for athletes altogether — the word “amateur” left the Olympic Charter in 1971, and by 1986, professionals competed openly.
The individual generally credited with creating the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, was hardly an athlete; instead, he was a French aristocrat who studied law and public affairs before turning to history and educational reform. The story generally goes like this. A Jesuit education steeped in the classics gave Coubertin a lifelong attachment to ancient Greece and, in particular, to the Athenian gymnasium, which he admired for its fusion of physical and intellectual training into a single program. Coubertin found a modern-day analogue in Rugby School, the boarding school that birthed the eponymous sport and embodied the ethos of muscular Christianity — the mid-Victorian conviction that organized sport built moral character by teaching duty, discipline, and self-sacrifice. Coubertin credited muscular Christianity with Britain’s imperial expansion, while attributing France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War to a lack of discipline. He published L’Éducation en Angleterre in 1888 and spent years campaigning in France for physical education reform to no avail.1
In November 1892, Coubertin delivered a lecture surveying the development of sport across nations — again praising England and lamenting France’s sluggishness — and argued that international athletic exchange would do more for peace than diplomacy. At the close, he proposed reviving the ancient Games. Classical culture had been revived repeatedly — in architecture, in painting, in letters — but by the end of the nineteenth century, each wave recycled a prior revival, and none had touched sport.
The Olympiad was well known, but it was part of a broader obsession with the sanctuary of Olympia that had haunted the Western imagination for centuries. At its center stood the Temple of Zeus — housing Pheidias’s chryselephantine statue, one of the Seven Wonders — and the sacred Altis grove where athletics, religion, and art converged every four years under a truce that suspended even warfare. Victory there was the supreme honor of the Greek world: Pindar celebrated Olympic victors as standing at the boundary of the human and divine; winning cities sometimes tore down their own walls, a champion’s return rendering them superfluous. Pausanias’s Guide to Greece had described every monument in exhaustive detail, making Olympia a vivid literary presence for European scholars who had never seen a stone of it — the site was thought lost, buried beneath centuries of silt, though the local Greeks claimed they knew perfectly well where it lay. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who founded art history and established Greek antiquity as its supreme aesthetic object, was murdered in Trieste in 1768 before he could reach it. When German archaeologists finally broke ground in 1875 and cleared the Altis by 1881, their annual reports were devoured by scholars and journalists alike.2
Three years before Coubertin spoke, an elaborate reconstruction of the buildings and monuments of ancient Olympia, based on the German excavations, had been displayed in the Palais des Beaux-Arts at the 1889 Paris Exposition, now most famous today for the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Coubertin was there organizing the Exposition’s own sports congress — five sessions on equitation, gymnastics, rowing, and athletics.3 Two years later, at an international congress he convened, delegates from fourteen nations voted to proceed and that June the International Olympic Committee was founded — not as a federation of national associations but as a self-selecting body, its members chosen by Coubertin himself. The first modern Games were held at Athens in 1896. These revived Olympics gave institutional form to a classical republican conviction: that the health of the citizen and the strength of the nation were one and the same thing, and that competition between nations was therefore competition between their programs of civic formation. But citizenship in the classical world Coubertin revered had always been a restricted category — in Athens, limited to free-born men — and Coubertin’s version was no different: he was a self-described “fanatical colonialist,” an avowed white supremacist who opposed women’s participation in the Games.4
Labelling Coubertin a reactionary would be too simple. His politics are, unfortunately, all too typical of his time, but they are also well known now and have been justly condemned. But instead of retreading that, what intrigues me is how close the relationship between art and the Olympics really was. The recent “rediscovery” of painting and sculpture competitions treats them as curiosities — forgotten oddities tacked onto an athletic program. But the art competitions were not oddities. They were central to Coubertin’s vision and to the original concept of the Games. This is hardly surprising, given that his father, Charles Louis de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, was a Paris Salon painter. A student of François-Édouard Picot, the elder Coubertin exhibited at the Salon for over four decades, beginning in the mid-1840s. He worked in the Orientalist and academic modes, produced a monumental papal commission — Le Cortège Pontifical, a ten-by-three-meter fresco now in the Vatican — and received the Légion d’Honneur from the Minister of Fine Arts in 1865. He was a successful and deeply conventional product of the concours system: jury submission, public exhibition, state validation. Pierre Coubertin grew up in this world, not Rugby School.5
The modern Games bear little structural resemblance to the ancient ones — and what they do resemble says more about nineteenth-century Parisian culture than about Olympia. At Olympia, a victor received an olive wreath; there was no second or third place. Athletes competed as individuals, not as national delegations marching behind flags. There were no opening ceremonies, no anthems, no podiums. British sporting culture, too, governed itself through democratic clubs and associations, not through self-recruiting academies of unelected officials.6 The gold-silver-bronze hierarchy, the national representation, the periodic international spectacle, the self-perpetuating governing body — none of this comes from Rugby or from Olympia. It comes from the concours — the French competitive exhibition system that organized cultural life from the Salon to the Expositions Universelles. No accident that the same year Pierre staged the Athens Games, his father Charles painted what he titled Jeux Olympiques, 1896 — a massive oil, eight by nearly ten meters, depicting Athena crowning a modern athlete in the style of a Prix de Rome composition. Pierre used it as the cover of the Revue Olympique from 1901 to 1914; it now hangs in the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, catalogued as Allégorie aux Sports.7
The Salon was the annual exhibition of painting and sculpture — the arena where reputations were made or destroyed through a formalized hierarchy of submission, jury selection, and tiered awards. The École des Beaux-Arts was a pyramid of elimination — hundreds of aspirants filtered through increasingly demanding rounds of competition until a single champion emerged. The Prix de Rome was the gold medal of French culture: finalists were sequestered in isolation booths for weeks, forbidden from outside contact, their work judged anonymously by the “Immortals” of the Académie des Beaux-Arts — and the winner received a fully funded residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, years of study among the classical and Renaissance masters at state expense. So, too, this model extended beyond art: the Expositions Universelles — the great World’s Fairs of 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900 — were giant competitions where nations vied to display the best machinery, the best livestock, and the best art, all ranked by expert juries awarding medals in gold, silver, and bronze.8
The concours was a specifically French institutional form, though its elements had scattered precedents — Italian guilds held design competitions from the fourteenth century, and Italian academies awarded prizes from the sixteenth. What the French system assembled was the specific combination of periodic public exhibition, an expert jury, and a tiered medal hierarchy, all state-backed and periodically repeating. The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, founded in 1648, built this apparatus piece by piece. It organized exhibitions of its members’ work from 1667; from 1725, these were held in the Salon Carré of the Louvre — the Salon for short. A formal selection jury arrived in 1748.9
What the Salon was to the eighteenth century, the industrial exposition was to the nineteenth. The first national industrial exposition, held in Paris in 1798, was explicitly modeled on the Salon. The historian Arthur Chandler documents that it “took its cue from the more prestigious salons of painting and sculpture”: a jury scrutinizing exhibited objects and awarding prizes to the best entries. Its nine-member jury included the painter Joseph-Marie Vien — David’s teacher, a member of the Institut de France — alongside chemists and industrialists. Three years later, the second exposition introduced the three-tier medal hierarchy: twelve gold, twenty silver, and thirty bronze. This is the earliest instance I could find of the system that the Olympics would adopt. The Salon swiftly followed, awarding medals in 1804, three years after the expositions.10
The first World’s Fair, London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, included fine arts — sculpture, architecture, decorative arts — but excluded painting. The 1855 Exposition Universelle corrected this. Napoleon III decreed that the annual Salon would stand alongside industry; art and steam engines were judged under the same institutional umbrella, ranked by the same medal system. Afterwards, every major World’s Fair included painting. When the same apparatus could evaluate a canvas and a locomotive, the form’s independence from any particular content was proved. The Salon had not invented the jury, the medal, or the periodic exhibition — each existed independently in French institutional life. What it had done was fuse them into a single system for ranking individual human achievement in a domain where merit was not self-evident, and that synthesis was what made the form portable.11
The 1900 Paris Olympics were listed in the program of the Exposition Universelle as Concours internationaux d’exercices physiques et de sports — international competitions in physical exercises and sport, one category among thousands. That same Exposition awarded 3,156 grand prizes, 8,889 gold medals, 13,300 silver medals, and 12,108 bronze medals to over 83,000 exhibitors. The Olympic sporting events were a small line item in this vast medal-awarding apparatus. Coubertin applied the grammar of the concours to the sentence of sport. At the 1896 Olympics in Athens, winners received silver medals and olive branches, runners-up bronze; there was no gold. The full gold-silver-bronze triad arrived only at the 1904 St. Louis Games, which were, again, embedded in a World’s Fair, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.12
In May 1906, Coubertin organized the Consultative Conference on Arts, Literature and Sport — at the Comédie-Française — and established five art competition categories: architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and music, the “Pentathlon of the Muses.” Art competitions ran as official Olympic medal events from 1912 through 1948, awarding 151 medals across seven editions. Coubertin was unambiguous: “Deprived of the aura of the art contests, Olympic games are only world championships.”13
When the IOC dropped the art competitions, it cited the professional nature of the competitors but also the lack of objective evaluation criteria, though dropping them may simply have made the concours origins of the Games — and the arbitrary nature of every judged event — less conspicuous. As any frustrated fan of figure skating or the half-pipe knows, such arbitrariness never left. At Salt Lake City in 2002, French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne ranked the Russian pair first as part of an arrangement: the Russian judge would reciprocate for the French ice dancers.14 At Milan-Cortina, French judge Jézabel Dabouis scored the French ice dancers nearly eight points above the Americans in the free dance — a margin so large that without her score, the Americans would have won gold. National blocs trading placements behind closed doors — the same accusations of bias, favoritism, and backroom dealing that dogged the Salon from its founding followed the form to the ice rink.
The Salon’s operating system — selection, exhibition, judgment, ranking — outlived the academic art it was designed to serve, the Expositions, and even the art competitions that Coubertin embedded in the Games, yet it survives in the Olympics today, its arbitrariness undiminished.
1 For the standard account of Coubertin’s inspiration in ancient Greece and Rugby School, see George Hirthler, “Celebrating Pierre de Coubertin: The French Genius of Sport Who Founded the Modern Olympic Games,” International Olympic Committee, September 1, 2019, https://www.olympics.com/ioc/news/celebrating-pierre-de-coubertin-the-french-genius-of-sport-who-founded-the-modern-olympic-games. ↩
2 See Louis Callebat, “The Modern Olympic Games and Their Model in Antiquity,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4, no. 4 (1998): 555–556; John MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (New York: Routledge, 2008), 156–157. ↩
3 The reconstruction of ancient Olympia at the 1889 Paris Exposition was designed by the French architect Victor Laloux, a former winner of the Prix de Rome, from data generated by the German excavations directed by Ernst Curtius, funded by Kaiser Wilhelm I under an 1874 agreement with the Greek government: Germany bore all costs; every find stayed in Greece. Excavations ran from 1875 to 1881 and were extensively published. See Callebat, “Modern Olympic Games,” 556; MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 156–157. ↩
4 On the founding of the IOC at the 1894 Sorbonne congress, see MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 188–203. MacAloon writes that “the roster of the IOC itself had been hand-picked by de Coubertin” and that Coubertin “established the principle of the IOC as a ‘self-recruiting body,'” 202. On Coubertin’s racial views: “The races are of different value, and to the white race, of superior essence, all the others must pledge allegiance.” “Pierre de Coubertin and the Origin of the Olympic Games,” Ville de Paris, https://www.paris.fr/en/pages/pierre-de-coubertin-and-the-origin-of-the-olympic-games-27628. He described himself as a “fanatical colonialist” and wrote that women’s admission to the Games was “against my will.” See also “‘Fanatical Colonialist’: The Uneasy Legacy of the French Founder of the Modern Olympics,” France 24, July 18, 2024, https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240718-fanatical-colonialist-uneasy-legacy-french-founder-of-modern-olympics-paris-games. ↩
5 On Charles de Coubertin’s Salon career, see Natalia Camps Y Wilant, “The Olympic Art Competitions: Olympic Medals for Artworks, Pierre de Coubertin’s Passion for Art, the Fine Art Salon, and the Social Circles,” Revue d’histoire culturelle, no. 8 (2024). Charles exhibited from 1845–46 onward; Camps Y Wilant identifies seven paintings shown at the Fine Art Salon between 1845 and 1850, with a diploma awarded in 1856. ↩
6 The Much Wenlock Olympian Games, founded by Dr. William Penny Brookes in 1850, complicate any clean French-vs.-British distinction. Wenlock included art and intellectual competitions — drawing, poetry, music — alongside athletics from the 1860s. Coubertin visited as Brookes’s guest in October 1890 and published a glowing account in La Revue Athlétique (25 December 1890): “If the Olympic Games that Modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survives today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr W. P. Brookes.” He later systematically downplayed Brookes’s role; Brookes died in December 1895, five months before the Athens Games. But the Wenlock competitions were a local voluntary-society affair: prizes began as cash and laurel wreaths, the art categories were knitting and sewing alongside reading and arithmetic, and there was no academic jury or hierarchical classification system. What Coubertin took from Wenlock was ceremonial and inspirational; the organizational framework of the IOC — periodic international congresses, self-recruiting governance, standardized medal hierarchies — came from French institutional culture. On the Wenlock pentathlon and Coubertin’s 1890 visit, see Sandra Heck, “William Penny Brookes – the Founding Father of the Modern Pentathlon?” Sport in History 34, no. 1 (2014): 75–89. The quote about Brookes is cited in MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 147. On the 1850 program and Brookes’s death, see also “A Country Town Hosted England’s First Olympics,” Associated Press, July 2, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/sports/olympic-legacy-claimed-by-an-english-country-town.html. ↩
7 The painting has circulated under three titles in sports history scholarship, all of which are apparently wrong. Camps Y Wilant recovered the original title from an annotated preparatory sketch in Charles de Coubertin’s personal Album; see her “Decoding Olympic History in a Painting by Charles de Coubertin,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 35, no. 17–18 (2019): 1815–1828, 8. ↩
8 On the concours system and its relationship to the Olympic model, see Camps Y Wilant, “When Art Was an Olympic Discipline: The Fine Art Salon as a Possible Model for the Concept of the Olympic Art Competitions,” Sport in History 38, no. 4 (2018): 457–475. ↩
9 On the institutional history of the Salon, see the classic Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). ↩
10 On the first industrial exposition as modeled on the Salon, see Arthur Chandler, “1798 Exposition,” https://www.arthurchandler.com/1798-exposition. The jury included the painter Joseph-Marie Vien alongside chemists and administrators. The 1801 medal counts (12 gold, 20 silver, 30 bronze) are from Arthur Chandler, “Napoleonic Expositions,” https://www.arthurchandler.com/napoleonic-expositions. On Vivant Denon establishing the Salon’s official medal system in 1804, see Claire Dupin de Beyssat, “Peers and Experts: What Gave the Salon Jury Its Legitimacy (1791–1880)?,” Biens Symboliques / Symbolic Goods 17 (2025), §8. ↩
11 On the Great Exhibition of 1851: the exhibition’s four divisions were raw materials, machinery, manufactures, and fine arts; Class XXX covered sculpture, models, and plastic art, but painting was excluded. See “Great Exhibition,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition. On Napoleon III’s decrees of 1852–1855 converting the planned 1854 national industrial exposition into the Exposition Universelle and creating a simultaneous Fine Arts exhibition, see Georges Poisson, “1855: France’s First International Exhibition,” Revue du Souvenir Napoléonien 457 (February–March 2005), republished at napoleon.org, https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/1855-frances-first-international-exhibition/. France’s 1855 addition of a full Beaux-Arts section became the permanent template. ↩
12 On the 1900 Games as a sub-category of the Exposition Universelle, see MacAloon, This Great Symbol, especially the section “True Tests and Living Pictures: The Exposition Tradition” in ch. 4, 147–156. MacAloon describes how Coubertin allowed the 1900 Games to be “amalgamated to world’s fairs, with almost disastrous consequences,” 156; the exposition bureaucrats “seized control” and the Games became “just a sideshow,” 313. MacAloon further observes that “among other exposition symbols that may have served as prototypes for Olympic symbols are the medals awarded to the winners of the industrial competitions,” endnote 74, 173. ↩
13 On the 1906 conference and the Pentathlon of the Muses, see Douglas Brown, “Revisiting the Discourses of Art, Beauty and Sport from the 1906 Consultative Conference,” Olympika V (1996): 43–52, and Andrew Edgar, “The Aesthetics of the Olympic Art Competitions,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 39, no. 2 (2012): 185–199. On the IOC’s stated reasons for discontinuing the art competitions — “organisational difficulties, lack of objective evaluation criteria, poor quality of the artworks and for other reasons” — see Camps Y Wilant, “When Art Was an Olympic Discipline” (2018), 9. Camps Y Wilant dismisses the quality argument as invalid given the caliber of participants and jury members; see also her “The Olympic Art Competitions” (2024), 4–5. ↩
14 On the 2002 Salt Lake City pairs skating scandal: French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne and French federation head Didier Gailhaguet were both suspended for three years by the ISU. A second gold medal was awarded to the Canadian pair, Jamie Salé and David Pelletier. See “Canadian Skaters Get Gold; Judge Suspended,” CNN, February 15, 2002. ↩