If you had one opportunity, would you take it?
Top Three @ The Paris 2024 Olympics
6th August 2024 - Part 6
Bring Back Poetry
Should poets be able to win an Olympic gold medal? That possibly sounds like a nonsense suggestion, but stick with me, it’s not as crazy as it sounds…
At the Stockholm 1912 Olympic Games, “artistic” events including architecture, painting, sculpture, music and literature were added to the programme, alongside tug of war and rope climbing. They continued to be Olympic events until London 1948. Apparently the reason they were dropped was because artists were considered to be “professional” in an era when everybody else competing in the Olympics were still strictly amateur. With the benefit of hindsight both of those things seem quaint.
I’ve believed for a long time that most stories about the innovation ecosystem are improved if we substitute the words “technology” with “poetry” and “entrepreneur” with “poet” For example: the headline “Government announces $300 million fund to accelerate the next generation of poets” would actually be news. Despite my lobbying there is still no local poetry focused venture fund. Be the place where poets want to live, I say!
Anyway, I think the same could apply to the Olympics. Is a lightweight women’s double-sculls rowing event or a 100m breaststroke race in the pool any more niche than a rap battle? We have break dancing in the Olympics already - it’s a short hop, skip and jump from there to beat boxing and rhyme.
Imagine Lorde representing New Zealand at the Olympics. It could be amazing.
Down the back, but who cares? Still the Louvre!
While the athletic achievements get most of the attention, the Olympic Games are also wrapped in art and design. The whole city is a canvas.
Every host city has the opportunity to apply its own style to the Games. Here in Paris 2024 the palette is pink, teal, purple and gold. It’s applied almost universally.1
There are hundreds of different elements to be designed - from the medals presented to winners and the podiums they stand on during the ceremony, through the uniforms worn by officials and volunteers, all the way to the official type face which is used everywhere from signs in the metro stations pointing at venues to country names on the giant scoreboards to the numbers on the lanes of the athletics track. If you pay really close attention you’ll even notice branded rubbish trucks and recycling stations.
Unlike other large sporting events, which are often smothered in advertising, there is no commercial signage inside the stadiums, which means the official branding really stands out.2
The intimidating thing for any designer working on this is they are creating work that will sit alongside one of the most recognised logos in the world. But when they get it right, we should celebrate. I love the very clever negative detail in the offical Paris 2024 emblem, for example. According to the offical website the emblem incorporates:
“the gold medal, the flame and Marianne, the personification of the French Republic”.
Très chic!
Having the Olympic flame hanging below a ballon that ascends every nights is also pretty clever design3 … although not quite as memorable as the archer lighting the flame in Barcelona 1992 with a burning arrow. The on-brand purple running track at Stade de France is striking … although not quite as iconic as the architecture of the Birds Nest stadium in Beijing 2008. The pièce de résistance for Paris in my opinion is the way they have incorporated the existing icons of the city into various venues: the archery by Les Invalides; the “urban” sports (skateboarding, street BMX and 3x3 basketball) in Place de la Concorde; the beach volleyball in the shadow of the Tour Eiffel, which sparkles each night on the hour; and perhaps most spectacularly the equestrian events at the Palace of Versailles.
My favourite sub-category of Olympic design are the pictograms, which are used to represent each sport and discipline. These were first used at the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, but the canonical examples are those designed by Otl Aicher for the Munich 1972 Games. These are an interesting challenge - they need to work small (e.g. as icons on the iPhone app) and large (e.g. as giant banners on the side of stadiums). It’s interesting to see how designers adapt these to fit with the identity system used in each host city. Designer Josep Maria Trias cleverly used paint strokes for Barcelona 1992 and at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer 1994 designers took inspiration from cave paintings.
The Tokyo 2020 pictograms were simple, and a bit of a throw-back to those early 1972 designs:
Here at Paris 2024 they have re-imagined the pictograms as “coats of arms” which … don’t quite do it for me. I dunno. Design is hard. And subjective. Perhaps it should be in the Olympics!?
Greatest show on Earth
I have a theory: everybody talking about medal tables is trying to sell you something.
It seems like each country has its own preferred way of sorting the medals that are won. If you’re Chinese then sorting first on gold medals won makes the most sense. If you’re from the USA you’ll prefer to talk about the total number of medals won, including silver and bronze. If you’re French then you like the first derivative - to highlight how many more medals have been won this time compared to the previous Olympics.4
If we re-wind to the 1980s the medal tables were a proper arm wrestle between the Cold War super powers. But, where did that get us? It got us to boycotts, drug scandals and tainted world records. That doesn’t seem optimal.
As we’ve discussed, for New Zealand it’s all about punching above our weight. For a few days we were top of the table. But then things got shaken up on the first night of athletics when athletes from Dominica, Grenada and Saint Lucia all won medals.5 The later was Julian Alfred winning gold in the 100m - and was the first medal ever won by athletes from that country. What a way to start! She followed that up tonight with silver in the 200m.
Here’s how we stand today, nearing the end of day 11 of 16 of competition (just a couple of boxing medals to decide, but I have another busy day of sports watching tomorrow, so I can’t wait up for those):
There are still 133 of the 329 gold medals to be decided, but to top the per capital medal table now (assuming Saint Lucia don’t win any more) would mean we need 70+ medals. So, time to re-group and adjust our strategy…
Clearly the medal table that matters is the per capita medal tables, excluding countries that have won fewer than two medals:
Or maybe the “teams of five million” (let’s call this the Welterweight medal table):
For completeness, we’re still hanging in there in 7th place on the 4th place medal table.
I don’t hold my breath, but I hope one day that we’ll stop talking about punching above our weight. It’s such a small aspiration. It’s disrespectful to the individual athletes who actually win these medals. Most of them have very high expectations of themselves and their performance. They don’t see their citizenship as a structural disadvantage to be overcome. They compete on an equal footing with athletes from countries with bigger and smaller populations. And it overlooks the many other athletes who haven’t performed to their potential. Remember at the Olympics more than anywhere else you don’t typically rise to the level of your expectations you fall to the level of your preparation. As they say: back to reality, there goes gravity.
This is the sixth instalment in a series of indeterminate length (but likely seven):
If you had one opportunity, would you take it?
I’ll try to wrap it all up in one final post before I head home. Stand by…
I’ve only spotted one rare exception - this first jump at the eventing cross country:
Is that Helvetica? Surely not!
Just a couple of exceptions I’ve noticed: Omega, who provide the official timing and get to put their logo on the timing displays, Samsung who have a small logo on the big screens, and even more subtly Louis Vuitton who provide the suitcases that the medals are presented from.
Fun fact: the “flame” burning in that cauldron isn’t actually a flame at all - it’s lights and water vapour engineered to give that effect - the actual Olympic flame is in a small lanterns which is located at ground level in the plaza beside the ballon.
It’s true France have won more medals than in previous Olympics, but perhaps that is a function of how many events they are competing in. They’ve also finished fourth a lot. In fact they have already finished fourth 13 times - more than in total at Tokyo 2020 or Rio 2016, with many more opportunities still ahead over the coming days.
The following night Shafiqua Maloney from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines also finished fourth in the women’s 800m. The athletics have been a great Olympics so far for tiny island nations. There is so much punching above weight going on it’s making a mockery of the weight divisions!
Intriguing!
To which I add, ‘While you see a chance, you take it’, as per music great (and possibly scratch speed climber?), Steve Winwood