eSports and the Olympics

The torrent of sports poetry inspired by the London Olympics continues unabated: NPR even hosted Poetry Games, in which listeners voted on a selection of verse with an athletic theme by celebrated poets from various countries. But few people today recall that poetry, just like the 100 meters, was an official Olympic competition from 1912 to 1948. Sadly, the names of the medal winners are not listed on the International Olympic Committee’s rosters. And many of the winning poems in the so-called Pentathlon of the Muses — which had to be “inspired by the idea of sport” — have mysteriously vanished as well, perhaps, as critics have suggested, because of their dubious literary quality.

Historians have searched in vain for ambitious works like “A Rider’s Instructions to His Lover,” for which the German equestrian poet Rudolf Binding won the silver medal in Amsterdam in 1928, or the French rugby champion Charles Gonnet’s zealous ode to ancient Greek athletes, “Before the Gods of Olympia” (bronze, Paris, 1924).

In the English language, the work whose loss has most vexed literary sports lovers is a paean to fencing, “Sword Songs,” by a British poet named Dorothy Margaret Stuart. Despite winning the silver medal at the hotly contested 1924 Paris Olympics, the verse sank into oblivion. The historian Bernhard Kramer in The Journal of Olympic History of 2004 was unable to trace the author, apart from noting that she had lived in Kew in Surrey and had once written a “moving lyric” about her dog, Mungo.

The torrent of sports poetry inspired by the London Olympics continues unabated: NPR even hosted Poetry Games, in which listeners voted on a selection of verse with an athletic theme by celebrated poets from various countries. But few people today recall that poetry, just like the 100 meters, was an official Olympic competition from 1912 to 1948. Sadly, the names of the medal winners are not listed on the International Olympic Committee’s rosters. And many of the winning poems in the so-called Pentathlon of the Muses — which had to be “inspired by the idea of sport” — have mysteriously vanished as well, perhaps, as critics have suggested, because of their dubious literary quality.

Historians have searched in vain for ambitious works like “A Rider’s Instructions to His Lover,” for which the German equestrian poet Rudolf Binding won the silver medal in Amsterdam in 1928, or the French rugby champion Charles Gonnet’s zealous ode to ancient Greek athletes, “Before the Gods of Olympia” (bronze, Paris, 1924).

In the English language, the work whose loss has most vexed literary sports lovers is a paean to fencing, “Sword Songs,” by a British poet named Dorothy Margaret Stuart. Despite winning the silver medal at the hotly contested 1924 Paris Olympics, the verse sank into oblivion. The historian Bernhard Kramer in The Journal of Olympic History of 2004 was unable to trace the author, apart from noting that she had lived in Kew in Surrey and had once written a “moving lyric” about her dog, Mungo.