The Ancient Greeks loved the arts, and they loved sport. What’s more, they liked putting the two together – the Pythian, Nemean, Isthmian and Panathenaic games all featured contests for poetry and music alongside the likes of wrestling, running and chariot racing. Not so the original Olympic Games. For its first four centuries from 776 BC, this quadrennial event was strictly reserved for young men to strip naked, oil up and run faster, throw further, punch harder and ride better than each other. But then, in 396 BC, even the Olympics succumbed to the allure of the arts, as a contest for heralds and trumpeters was introduced.
Fast forward another 23 centuries, and Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, dreamed of a similar marriage of sport and arts. A true renaissance man who was equally at home in the opera house as on a rugby field, de Coubertin had already overseen the first two outings of his new Olympics – in Athens (1896) and Paris (1900) – when he started to moot that they should embrace cultural activities too, setting out his ideas in an article in in 1904 and then at a conference in Paris two years later. His plans for an accompanying pan-artistic celebration of sport effectively paved the way for the increasingly spectacular opening and closing ceremonies that would be a
