From Olympia to the Olympics

When Pindar wrote his odes for Olympic victors, he was not reporting the news. He was performing an act that was both religious and political, in the highest and earliest sense of those terms. The champion did not win for himself. He won for his city, for the gods, for a cosmic order that sport made visible and tangible. In Olympian 5, Pindar is clear: victory is a gift from the gods that falls upon the entire community. The Olympic champion was a bridge between human and divine, a point of contact between bodily effort and cosmic perfection. The polis absorbed that light and held it in common. 

Myron’s Discobolus does not record a throwing technique. It fixes in marble the instant when the human body meets the ideal. Proportion, balance, tension suspended in the instant before release. Kalokagathia, the Greek union of beauty and virtue, was seen not as a goal but as the default condition of excellence. In sport, it found its most concrete and universal form. To represent the athlete meant to represent what a human being could be if living in harmony with the order of the world. It was already a collective statement of intent. Rome inherited this system and reversed it. Sport stopped being a dialogue with the divine and became a tool of governance, a mechanism for securing public consent, an architecture of control. In his Satires, Juvenal coined the phrase panem et circenses not as praise but as a bitter, almost clinical diagnosis: the Roman people had traded political freedom for bread and spectacle. The representation of sport here is already social critique.

The mosaics at the Villa del Casale in Piazza Armerina show female athletes in bikinis competing with weights and balls. They are an extraordinary record of organized women’s sport, yet already aestheticized, domesticated, reduced to ornament for the patrician elite. Women’s sport exists, but it is confined to villas and made decorative. Rome teaches us something that still resonates with painful precision: when sport becomes pure mass spectacle, its representation swings between celebration and denunciation, and the distance between the two grows dangerously thin. Those who celebrate and those who criticize share the same amphitheater.

The Renaissance rediscovered the body as an autonomous subject, a protagonist rather than a mere instrument. When Leonardo studied human movement—those drawings in which the body opens like a perfect mechanism, displayed in all its complex wonder—space reopened for thinking of physical gesture as an expression of human dignity. But it was a recovery mediated by philology. The body was rediscovered through ancient texts, through the filter of classical culture. The Renaissance body was read before it was lived. Then came the twentieth century, and with it Delaunay.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Robert Delaunay painted his celebrated series of runners, rugby players, and the Cardiff team. He was not depicting physical effort. He was doing something more ambitious. He was arguing for the moment itself. To get the full measure of this project, we need to return to Simultanism, the theory he developed with his wife Sonia. The idea was simple: reality never unfolds in sequence, as traditional narrative suggests, but in simultaneity. Everything happens at once, and painting must find a way to render that coexistence. Color, not line, is the tool. Simultaneous color contrasts produce movement, rhythm, optical vibration. The canvas does not represent movement. It generates it. In the Coureurs cycle of 1924–26, the athletes’ bodies fragment into arcs of pure color—red, blue, orange, green. They merge with the background and the surrounding space. There is no longer a clear distinction between figure and environment, between runner and track, between the energy of the gesture and the energy of the crowd. Delaunay dissolves the athletic body into its own dynamics and turns it into an optical event. Muscle becomes light. Effort becomes chromatic frequency. We do not know who those runners are. It does not matter. What matters is rhythm, pulse, vibration. It is a radical democratization of athletic gesture: not the champion but the movement; not the hero but the vital force that runs through all bodies.

L’Équipe de Cardiff goes further. Players, the Eiffel Tower, advertisements, and urban signage share the same surface in an almost cinematic montage. Sixty years earlier, Delaunay understood that sport is always a system of signs. It includes the city, the market, technology, and the collective gaze. Athletic gestures are inseparable from their context. It is never just sport. It is always something more. Today, with Milano–Cortina 2026—its promises and unfinished sites, its ambitions and contradictions—that question returns with urgency: what do we want sport to say about us? A major Olympic event is always a mirror. Society stages its image there, along with its fears and its strength. The Greeks knew this. Rome knew it. The spectacle is guaranteed by broadcast rights, sponsors, and billions in investment. But what about wonder? That ability to stop time that Myron fixed in marble, that Delaunay exploded in color. Art’s task is not to reproduce athletic gestures. Its task is to restore the gesture’s rarity. Not to multiply images, but to create one that can stop us. Like the Discobolus. Like the Coureurs. Like that one photograph, that one frame, that sometimes pierces the screen and settles in memory forever.

From Olympia to Milan, the Olympics have always taught us how to look. The question is whether contemporary art still knows how to teach us to see.

Opening image: The mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons