When Finland’s Olympic medals are listed, one gold medal in literature is often forgotten. Finland won it at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
The father of the modern Olympic Games was the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who had a grand vision of uniting sport and art—or “muscles and mind”—in the spirit of ancient Greece. He was an eloquent enough man to bring about the founding of the International Olympic Committee in 1884, and then the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.
The very first Games did not yet include cultural events, but eventually Coubertin persuaded the Olympic Committee to agree that the 1908 Games would include a Pentathlon of the Muses: literature, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. All submitted works were to be inspired by sport and to celebrate its ennobling effect on the human mind.
The 1908 Games, however, were overshadowed by the eruption of Vesuvius, which killed around 200 people in 1906 and led to the Games being moved to London, and the debut of the arts events postponed until the Stockholm Olympics of 1912. At that point interest was still modest, and only a few dozen entries were submitted, fewer than ten of them in literature.
The Rise of the Cultural Events
The popularity of the cultural events gradually increased, however, so that by 1928 there were already more than a thousand entries. By then the literature category had been divided into two events: epic and lyric poetry.
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the arts events were administered by that well-known man of culture, Joseph Goebbels. Finland shone by winning the gold medal in literature. Altogether, 16 works were submitted in the category. The winner was the poet Urho Karhumäki with his novel Avoveteen. It tells the story of the runner Yrjö Niemelä. In 1939, Orvo Saarikivi made a film of the same name based on the book, starring Irma Seikkula and Kullervo Kalske.
Was Finland’s Medal a Fix?
Later it has often been suspected that Hitler arranged Karhumäki’s victory, much as the Soviet Red Machine from time to time granted friendly-minded Finland consolation victories in ice hockey. It is plausible, but unproven. The last time cultural prizes were awarded at the Olympics was in 1948.
Throughout their existence, the Olympic cultural prizes were subject to much criticism. One reason was that the competition did not attract the great literary names of its era, but remained mostly a contest among amateurs. No doubt this was also affected by the Coubertinian view of Olympic art as a celebration of the ideological side of sport.
Idealism Far Away
History has since shown that international competitive sport is far removed from idealism. As everywhere that large sums of money nest and move, rot and corruption prevail around it, and dictators seek to use the Games as advertising platforms for their own political Disneylands or other theme parks.
The athletes themselves, some of them, are also willing to cheat, using every possible inconspicuous or hard-to-detect method that medicine can provide. Since doping, for instance, is an arms race in which testing techniques are always slightly behind new innovations, and since clean sport will therefore probably never be achieved, I have long thought that all enhancement of bodily performance should be allowed in separate “anything goes” freak categories. But being caught cheating outside them should automatically lead to a lifetime competition ban and a court-ordered punishment for fraud.
Did Being Dropped from the Olympics Save Culture?
Looking at the moral decay of the international sports movement, one begins to think that literature’s disappearance from the Olympics was a blessing. If it were still included, it would undoubtedly be caught in the same whirlpool of moral pressures.
Putin, for example, could buy the literary events by bribing the leadership of the International Olympic Literature Federation. Then, as the poet of a pro-Western country stood blushing and reading his final poem in a Moscow stadium, the wind gates would be opened and, from their shadows, a few carefully trained Z-doves would be released. They would attack the fascist poet, ruin his performance with their droppings, and in this respect too save the world from immoral Western literature, where feminists, homosexuals, and deniers of Russia’s birthright and natural borders run riot.
Long live literature outside the international Olympic movement!
