Let's see Michael Phelps do that!
June 19, 2019 8:59 PM   Subscribe

At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, American Walter Winans took the podium and waved proudly to the crowd. He had already won two Olympic medals—a gold for sharpshooting at the 1908 London Games, as well as a silver for the same event in 1912—but the gold he won at Stockholm wasn’t for shooting, or running, or anything particularly athletic at all. It was instead awarded for a small piece of bronze he had cast earlier that year: a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot. For his work, An American Trotter, Winans won the first ever Olympic gold medal for sculpture.
posted by Chrysostom (5 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
So you can turn bronze into gold, not lead. As far as the title, perhaps if they had kept the competitions Phelps would have excelled at glassblowing?
posted by sysinfo at 10:11 PM on June 19, 2019 [2 favorites]


Not a chariot; a sulky, as used in harness racing.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:31 AM on June 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


I'm not sure that pre-made works of art really work for The Olympics. But competitive art - maybe that?
- All the sculpture contestants start off with the same block of marble and are given the length of the Olympiad to make something out of it. Then they have to talk about what it is supposed to mean - if they wish to. Finally some judges score everything and elect a winner.

However: If we are resurrecting old events - I'd still go for the Tug of War first. Here is footage of the event from 1912.
posted by rongorongo at 5:36 AM on June 20, 2019


I'm not sure that pre-made works of art really work for The Olympics. But competitive art - maybe that?

Man. The performance-enhancing-drug screening is gonna be brutal.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:47 AM on June 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Town planning was also an Olympic event, a topic about which I once gave a brief talk at a national planning conference; the audience was very surprised. Both the planning and architecture medals tended to be awarded to sports-related projects and/or improvements in which the host country took great pride. For example, the 1936 gold went to the Reichsportfield, although the silver went to Brooklyn's Marine Park. The last town planning awards took place in 1948; Finland took gold which is an outcome that pleases me. Town planners were, as a group, deemed "professionals" and thus ineligible for Olympic glory... just like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan, I guess.
posted by carmicha at 7:10 AM on June 20, 2019 [5 favorites]


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