Olympic Visions: Images of the Games through History

‘Throughout the modern era, the Olympic Games have provided a primary focus for visual culture in its broadest sense.’ This is the central plank of Mike O’Mahony’s short, though informative and timely, study about how Olympiads since Athens 1896 have been subject to widespread representation. Indeed, Pierre de Coubertin, the founding father of the modern Games, drew inspiration from the ancient Greeks by realising that Olympism would involve the fusion of sport and the arts. O’Mahony’s task here is, therefore, monumental, given that such an undertaking embraces film and photography, television and press reports, painting and sculpture, poster design, and printed ephemera such as stamps and cigarette cards. But he is not overwhelmed by such a myriad of material and demonstrates mostly a cool, clear sense of focus, avowing his selectivity from the outset on key moments, themes and media, and organizing the argument both chronologically and thematically. Thus we have chapters dealing with discrete media—film, posters and stadia—as well as related topics like propaganda, protest and gender.

Accordingly, what emerges is a fascinating history that ranges far and wide over time and place and takes into account the precursors for both the modern Olympiad and its publicity. Thus O’Mahony addresses early pamphlets such as Robert Dover’s Annalia Dubrensia (1636), which commemorated the ‘Olimpick Games’ held near Chipping Camden in the Cotswolds, and prototypical competitions such as businessman Evangelis Zappas’ attempt to revive the Olympic ideal in Greece in 1859 and philanthropist William Henry Brookes’ coterminous staging of the Olympian Games at Much Wenlock, Shropshire. In homage to the ancient Games Brookes introduced a pentathlon in 1868 and Hunt and Roskell, silversmiths to Queen Victoria, designed a special silver medal for the prizewinner. Although such precedents were regional rather than national events, along with the pro-Hellenism of the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of sporting culture in Britain and France, they dispel the myth that modern era Olympism was shaped single-handedly by De Coubertin.

After a promising start at Athens in 1896, the following three Olympiads were more diffuse affairs spread out over several months, with the sporting competitions being incorporated into the large-scale international exhibitions held at Paris (1900), St. Louis (1904) and London (1908). This led to some questionable ideological outcomes that were opposed both at the time and afterwards. At St. Louis, for example, spectators were invited to attend ‘Anthropology Days’, athletic competitions staged exclusively for what their organiser James E. Sullivan termed ‘the several savage tribes’ who participated. In fact, the event was a sham, involving randomly chosen individuals rather than black sportsmen as a means to demonstrate the inferiority of all non-white races. O’Mahony deals with such racism sensitively in a chapter called ‘Olympic Transgressions’, where he also takes an even-handed approach to evaluating the representation of African-American athlete Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Games as a challenge to the rise of Fascism and Aryanism, and the Black Power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 200 metres medal ceremony in Mexico, 1968. While both Smith and Carlos paid heavily for their action and were ostracized from American sports organizations, as O’Mahony reveals, the visual impact of the incident still resounds in its replication on T-shirts and political posters, as well as its commemoration in Ricardo Gouveia’s mixed media monument to Tommie Smith and John Carlos (2005) for the campus of San José State University, California, where the Civil Rights movement was engendered in America.

In effect, the ideological and political dimension of how Olympism has been represented forms a leitmotiv in O’Mahony’s project, insofar as it subtends and harnesses the separate chapters to one degree or another. To this end, therefore, the Berlin Olympics also inevitably crop up in the chapter ‘Celluloid Games’. The 1908 Games in London were the first to be recorded on film and in 1924 Paris produced the first full-length feature film by Jean de Rovera, but O’Mahony concentrates principally on Olympia (1938), the seminal work of Leni Riefenstahl (several times referred to here as Reifenstahl), and Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965). He makes a decent fist of weighing up Riefenstahl’s dilemma in directing a film that would celebrate physical achievement, without necessarily aligning it or her to Third Reich politics, as well as in analysing the formal qualities of both films and how they focused on athletic performance. The jury is still out as to whether Riefenstahl was a complicit or coerced Nazi sympathizer, and O’Mahony discusses this thoughtfully in regard to the tension between art and propaganda in Olympia. Oddly, however, he overlooks the broader critical discourse around this issue, as manifest in writing by Susan Sontag, Graham McFee and Alan Tomlinson, and Susan Tegel, all of whom address more overtly the idea of body fascism and how it evinces an ambiguous aesthetic/political response.¹ Of equal relevance, but absent also from O’Mahony’s discussion, is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s provocative study, In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Belknap, London, 2006), which analyses sport as a form of visual fascination and how this is a matter of phenomenology—the relationship of bodies to things, spaces and cultural experiences.

To a certain extent, this shortfall also stalks his assessment of the role and representation of women in sport. Women competed in the Olympics from 1900 onward, initially in archery, croquet, golf and tennis, and, encouraged by the example of French rower Alice Milliat and her involvement with Fémina Sport, in five athletics events at the 1928 Amsterdam Games. It is interesting to note that De Coubertin himself was opposed to female competitors at the Olympic Games since he believed their participation could only encourage voyeurism among male spectators. O’Mahony picks up the thread in his assessment of female tennis players, in particular Suzanne Lenglen, ‘La Divine’, and how she promoted a link between sport and fashion—both on and off the field—in the 1920s [1]. And yet, he misses here the opportunity for a deeper analysis about the politics of the male gaze. Likewise, when it comes to the issue of gender ambiguity, he could push the theoretical envelope much further. American athlete Mildred ‘Babe’ Didrikson was widely criticized for flouting hetero-normative ideals of femininity at the 1932 Los Angeles Games, but this opprobrium was as nothing compared to the charge of masculinism levelled at Soviet female sportswomen such as Irina and Tamara Press. Coinciding with Cold War anxieties, these athletes were depicted by media in the West as sexually aberrant, a tendency that Ann Hall aptly sums up as ‘body McCarthyism’, and their alleged unconventional female attributes led to messy gender verification testing between 1966 and 1996. O’Mahony deals with these points well enough and is right to assert that such gender thinking is not just a Cold War phenomenon. But, in doing so, he relegates the debate to a footnote about the controversy surrounding Caster Semanya’s sexist treatment by the (male-dominated) International Association of Athletics Federations, while the issue of intersexuality could have been profitably framed in relation to Judith Butler’s compelling theory of performativity. After all, it is not for nothing that she contends in Gender Trouble (Routledge, London & New York, 1990) and Bodies that Matter (Routledge, London & New York, 1993) that sex and gender are a matter of doing identity, rather than being or having one.

Fig 1.

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Réné Vincent, ‘Tennis with Mademoiselle Suzanne Lenglen’, illustration from La Vie au Grand Air (1921)

It was, of course, Cold War ideology that fuelled Communist Russia’s involvement with the Olympic Games—the USSR first competed at Helsinki in 1952—and, given the demonstrable expertise O’Mahony has already shown in Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture-Visual Culture (Reaktion, London, 2006), it comes as no surprise to find an engrossing chapter on Russia’s involvement in sport here as well. This enables him to address parallel, though distinct, events such as the Red Sport International Spartakiads for men and women from workers’ organizations, initiated in 1921. These were a blatant attempt by the Soviet State to promote socialism over capitalism, but they also generated exciting Constructivist graphic designs by the likes of Gustav Klutsis.

Echoing the likes of Allen Guttman,² O’Mahony insists the main aim of his project is to transcend the usual statistical and verbal accounts of the Olympic Games and to redress the way that the role of visual culture has been marginalized in other historical and sociological accounts about them. He does not cite the authors and texts he means and one is left to wonder who and what they are exactly. Schiller and Young, for instance, incorporate the visual—and material—culture of the Games into their magisterial analysis of the socio-politics of the Munich Olympiad.³ By contrast, there are occasions when O’Mahony’s argument suffers from compression and could be more nuanced, most evidently in the short chapter ‘Designs on the Olympics’ that glosses stadia, mascots, medals and trophies. Such artefacts are the concern of material culture as much as visual culture and thus more complex in regard to their dialectical use/symbolic value than is portrayed here. Similarly, while I fully appreciate his need to be selective, I feel there are some quite notable oversights and exclusions in this book, as well as some imbalance between the designated, official representations of respective Olympiads and those that accrued to them topically or peripherally. Thus there is little said about the groundbreaking posters Otl Aicher masterminded for Munich 1972, nor is a single one of them reproduced, whereas Kurt Strumpf’s iconic photograph of a hooded Black September terrorist illustrates a wider discussion about the action by the Popular Liberation Front of Palestine that claimed the lives of eleven Israeli athletes. Why also is there no assessment of the impact of the international typographic style of the Swiss School on Yusaku Kamekura’s graphic designs for Tokyo in 1964? And why are the imaginative designs by the Artists-Athletes Coalition for the 1976 Montreal Games omitted from the chapter on Olympic posters?⁴ Clearly, this is to take the insider’s view and his study is not necessarily aimed at an expert academic audience, but one that—academic or otherwise—will be new to the topic. As O’Mahony rightly contends, this is a subject whose time has come and on this level his is a worthwhile, if uneven, overview and one that will serve readers well as a clearly articulated and lavishly illustrated introduction to the relationship between sport and visual culture in its aesthetic, social and political contexts.

Notes