The Olympics once handed out medals for paintings, symphonies, poems, buildings, and statues. Not honorary certificates. Real medals. Gold, silver, bronze—just like the 100-meter dash. It sounds like a prank your history teacher would pull, but it happened for decades and drew thousands of entries. Sports on the field. Art on the walls. One giant festival of bodies and brains.
How the idea landed on the podium
Pierre de Coubertin—the driving force behind the modern Games—loved the ancient Greek blend of sport and culture. The Greeks didn’t split muscle from muse. So when the modern Olympics took shape, he pushed for a twin track: athletic contests and artistic contests. After some wrangling and a few false starts, the first official art competitions debuted at Stockholm 1912. From there, medals for art were awarded at Antwerp 1920, Paris 1924, Amsterdam 1928, Los Angeles 1932, Berlin 1936, and London 1948. War canceled the Games in 1916, 1940, and 1944, but the art medals kept returning whenever the flame did.
What counted as “Olympic art”
Five big categories stood on the program:
Architecture
Literature
Music
Painting
Sculpture
Each work had to be brand-new and inspired by sport. That rule mattered. No dusting off your already-famous landscape and slapping a javelin in the corner. The juries wanted stadiums, swimmers, straining sprinters, odes to motion, symphonic crowd roars—the creative version of a photo finish.
Within those five, sub-events popped up. Architecture might include “stadium design” or “town planning.” Painting often split into oils, watercolors, prints, and drawings. Literature drifted across lyric, epic, and dramatic. Music could be anything from a chamber piece to a full orchestral score. If it could be composed, carved, inked, drafted, staged, or built—and if sport sat at its heart—it could chase a medal.
How judging worked without stopwatches
No finish lines. No world records. Just juries—usually a mix of artists, critics, and officials—who sifted through exhibitions that sometimes filled entire halls. Entries arrived under the artists’ real names, yet in the early years some used pseudonyms. The most famous mask: “Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach,” the supposed authors of an ode that won literature gold at the very first event in 1912. Pull back the curtain and you’ll find… de Coubertin himself. The founder of the modern Olympics secretly took home a gold medal for poetry about sport. Power move.
Yes, some people medaled in both sport and art
If you’re wondering whether any athlete crossed over, the answer is yes—more than once. A star example: Walter Winans, a crack shot who won shooting gold in 1908 and silver in 1912. That same 1912 Games, he also won sculpture gold for An American Trotter, a bronze figure of a harness-racing horse. Few resumes can carry “Olympic champion” and “award-winning sculptor” on the same line, but Winans’ did.
Another great crossover story: Alfréd Hajós, double swimming champion in 1896. Almost three decades later, he returned as an architect and earned a medal for a stadium design. Imagine doing butterfly sprints in your twenties and collecting an architecture medal in your fifties. That’s range.
Who actually entered—and how big was this scene?
Bigger than you’d guess. Hundreds of works per Games wasn’t unusual; some years climbed past a thousand. National committees rallied artists the way they rallied sprinters. Host cities turned their exhibitions into showpieces. Amsterdam 1928 went all-in and made the arts a citywide spectacle. Los Angeles 1932 put on a polished display even while the world wrestled with the Depression. Berlin 1936 used the arts with a heavy propaganda hand. London 1948—just three years after the war’s end—still found the energy to hang paintings, play music, read poems, and hand out medals.
Why did the Olympic art competitions end?
The short version: the “amateur” rule. For decades, the Olympics insisted on amateur status in sport. No professionals allowed. That principle ran headfirst into the art hall. Most serious artists already earned their living from art. How do you find a “pure amateur” composer or architect at medal level? You don’t, really. The IOC wrestled with this contradiction for years and finally decided the art medals didn’t fit the Olympic eligibility model.
There were other headaches. Juries differed wildly by taste. Vague criteria hurt consistency. Some countries struggled to ship fragile works. And there’s the obvious: judging a 400-meter race is easier than judging a poem. Eventually, after London 1948, the IOC scrapped the competitions and shifted the whole idea toward exhibitions—what we now call the Cultural Olympiad or “Olympic arts festivals.” Art stayed in the tent, just without the medal chase.
Did those medals “count” and do they still?
They absolutely counted at the time. Artists stood on stage, heard their names, earned medals, and saw their work in official reports. Later, the IOC removed art medals from the official medal database to keep statistics clean and consistent with modern eligibility rules. That doesn’t erase the events or the winners; it just means you won’t find “symphony gold” on your country’s medal table anymore. Historians still trace the results. Collectors hunt down catalogs. Museums mount retrospectives. The legacy sits in plain sight—just not in the same column as javelin or judo.
What did the art look and sound like?
A lot of figurative work. Runners in flight. Rowers in sync. A boxer’s guard. Horses mid-stride. Sculptors loved motion caught in bronze. Painters loved muscles carved by light. Architects sketched modernist stadiums and natatoriums. Composers wrote fanfares, marches, lyrical pieces shaped by rhythm and breath. Literature moved from grand odes to finely observed vignettes about a single, sweaty moment. Some entries read a bit stiff today; some still zing. The best pieces capture the same thing you feel in the stands: anticipation, burst, release.
Why this forgotten chapter matters now
The Olympics keep talking about values—excellence, friendship, respect. The art competitions made those values visible in a different way. They said sport isn’t only about results. It’s stories, spaces, sounds, and images. It’s the city that hosts. It’s the poster that lures you in. It’s the video you replay because the movement looks like music. The medals are gone, but the idea still breathes inside every Cultural Olympiad: open the doors and let artists interpret what sport does to us.
Could the medals ever come back?
Unlikely, and honestly, unnecessary. The modern Games juggle enough. Adding juried medals would spark endless debates and swamp the schedule. The cultural program already does the important part: it gives artists resources, shows, residencies, commissions, and giant audiences. No podium needed.
A quick timeline to keep it straight
1896–1908: de Coubertin pushes the idea; pilot efforts simmer.
1912: First official art medals at Stockholm.
1912–1948: Seven editions award art medals; wars interrupt three Games.
1949–1952: The IOC shifts to non-competitive exhibitions.
Today: Cultural Olympiads and arts festivals run alongside each Games—global stage, no medals.
A few names to drop at dinner
Pierre de Coubertin (as “Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach”): literature gold, 1912.
Walter Winans: shooting gold (1908), shooting silver (1912), sculpture gold (1912).
Alfréd Hajós: swimming double gold (1896), architecture medal (1924).
Jean Jacoby: two-time art gold medalist from Luxembourg—rare double anywhere in Olympic history.
So what do we take from all this?
The Olympics once asked a beautiful question: if sport is human expression at full tilt, why not celebrate the other ways humans express? For a few decades, the answer involved medals and juries. Now it involves festivals and commissions. Either way, the message lands. Speed, strength, sweat—then paint, poem, sound, space. Same flame, different fuel.
Want to explore more?
Dive into the IOC’s history of the Olympic art competitions for a clear overview and primary-source flavor. And for a lively narrative with anecdotes and archival nuggets, try this Smithsonian deep read on Olympic art medals.
If you ever catch someone saying the Olympics are “just sports,” tell them about the year a poem beat the field. And the horse statue that outkicked everyone. And the swimmer-architect who designed a stadium after racking up golds in a frigid open-air pool. The Games have always been bigger than a stopwatch. They still are.
