HOW CIVILISED, as we were reminded on page 5 yesterday (“Jack B Yeats honoured on new €10 coin”), that the Olympic Games used to include competitions in art and literature. And how uplifting to recall that, in its first post-independence outing – at the Paris Olympiad of 1924 – Ireland’s cultural team should have done so well.
Those were the Olympics probably best known to modern audiences from the multi-Oscar winning film Chariots of Fire(1981). Which, as readers may remember, made a big deal of British victories in such vulgar pursuits as the 100-metre sprint and the 400-metre hurdles.
Meanwhile, at the very same Olympiad, not only was the Free State claiming silver at sports-themed painting (for Yeats's The Liffey Swim), it was also taking bronze in literature, courtesy of Oliver St John Gogarty and his ode to the Tailteann Games. Indeed, Ireland's two-medal haul was enough for joint-fourth place in the cultural medals table, ahead of the UK, which had to settle for a solitary silver.
It could be argued, furthermore, that we didn't even have our best team out in Paris. For example – and despite having undergone extensive acclimatisation in the host city beforehand – James Joyce did not compete. With Ulyssesbehind him, he was probably past his best by then anyway. And it's also true that sport was never one of his favoured themes.
Even so. He would still had more than enough, one would think, to win the literature competition. And failing him, Jack B’s older brother Willie (who had landed the Nobel prize a year earlier) would surely have beaten all the other poets in the contest pulling up.
In fact, Gogarty’s bronze-winning effort in the iambic-metre dash – as it wasn’t known – suggests that the required standard was less than parnassian. He himself later dismissed his ode as “tripe”, which is perhaps a little harsh. Suffice to say that that, to use a sporting analogy, it appears to have been wind-assisted.
Like an experienced miler, Gogarty did pace himself carefully enough through the first three of the four verses, in which he established a tacit link between Ireland’s ancient (and then about to be revived) Tailteann games and the Olympics.
Then, just after the bell, he attempted to mount a big finish. But by the end, as the last verse suggests, he was tying up badly, viz: “Where the blue eye beams with light/Where there is an open hand/Where the mood is dark and bright/There is also Ireland/Welcome brothers and well met/In the land that bids you hail/Far apart though we be set/Gael does not forget the Gael.”
OF COURSE, fielding Joyce or WB Yeats might not have been in the spirit of the competition anyway. As it was, concern over the professionalism of the artists, vis-a-vis the amateurism of the athletes, eventually led to the cultural competitions being dropped from the Olympics in the 1950s. And in the interim, after that dramatic start, Irish competitors did not fare so well.
Perhaps reflecting the rise of Éamon de Valera, who famous championed the romping of sturdy children and the contests of athletic youth, Ireland became dependent on sport as a source of Olympic medals. Art was not responsible for either of our two golds in 1932, which came instead via the 400-metre hurdles and the hammer.
By now, the artistic Olympiads had expanded to include sculpture and, in the architecture section, “town planning”. Neither of these were Irish specialities, even then. But happily, in the last Olympics to have a culture section – 1948 in London – we did make the arts podium again, when Letitia Hamilton took a painting bronze in the “oil and watercolours” section, for a picture of point-to-point horse-racing in Co Meath.
Thereafter, the nearest thing to Irish poetry at the games would be Ronnie Delaney stretching his legs down the home strait in Melbourne. As for Irish Olympic oil paintings, we would arguably have to wait until the 2012 London games and Katie Taylor: surely the prettiest world boxing champion since Muhammad Ali, and she doesn’t even boast about it, like he did.
It’s probably just as well that the arts were ousted from the Olympics, at least in competitive form (since 1952, there have been mere exhibitions to coincide with the games). Professionalism aside, I can imagine there would also have been problems with drug-taking, eventually. As a group, artists are even more infamous than 100-metre sprinters for the use of performance-enhancing substances. Out-of-performance testing would have been chaotic.
And such was the nature of 20th-century art, there might have been other tensions too. The increasingly abstract nature of art did not lend itself so well to competition. Worse still, one of the rising movements from 1924 onwards was Dadaism: an anarchic force, whose followers were as much bent on destruction as creation. Having the likes of them in a competition that also included hammer-throwing – not to mention a torch – would have been just asking for trouble.