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).
His next move was to suggest that the games should embrace cultural activities too. He set out his ideas in an article in Le Figaro in 1904 and then at a conference in Paris two years later. De Coubertin's 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 feature of Games to come. However, he wanted more – namely to integrate the arts into the competition itself. From a musical point of view his wish has, to some extent, been fulfilled over the years, though not always in ways that he might have expected…
Stay with us as we run through the 11 most memorable musical Olympics.
Greatest Olympic musical moments
11. 1908: Win when you’re singing
The run-up to the 1908 Olympics was a chaotic affair. That year’s Games should have been in Rome but, following a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1906, the Italian government decided to direct its resources elsewhere. And so, as London stepped in with just two years to prepare, the introduction and organisation of five new competitive arts events – architecture, painting, sculpture, literature and music composition – was always going to be a battle against the clock.
Charles Villiers Stanford was put in charge of formatting the music composition event but soon realised, as did his colleagues in charge of the other four disciplines, that he had an impossible job on his hands. Instead, suggested the composer, why not have a choral competition?
This might be a more practical option, not least as singing had been strongly advocated at the 1906 Paris conference as an important aid to physical health. His idea was, alas, rejected and London 1908 went ahead arts competition-free, but by the time of the Stockholm Games in 1912, all five events were ready to take their place in the schedule.
10. 1932: A major blow for Suk
Though launched with the best intentions, the musical composition event at the Olympics was hardly a roaring success. Faced with a patchy level of entries, the judges rarely elected to award all three medals, and in 1924 left the podium totally empty. Of those who did win medals over the years, only one was a well-known name, when Josef Suk (one of our ten best Czech composers) took silver at Los Angeles in 1932 (no gold or bronze was awarded that year).
And even then, the Czech composer’s Towards a New Life was not written specially for the occasion, but was simply a rehash of a patriotic march composed for the Czech army back in 1919. In 1936, the music composition event was split into three categories – orchestral, instrumental and vocal/choral – with the whole lot being jettisoned just one Olympics later, in 1948.
9. 1924: Fired up by G&S
For the 1924 Olympics in Paris, the playing of national anthems as winners collected their medals was introduced. The stipulation that no anthem could be longer than 80 seconds, however, meant that for a number of countries some nifty editing had to be done first. The nine Brits to enjoy a gold medal-earned ‘God save the King’ included 100m sprinter Harold Abrahams, though the evidence suggests he would have preferred a little Gilbert and Sullivan as he stood on the podium.
You see, when (57 years later) Abrahams’s exploits were celebrated in the film Chariots of Fire, his portrayed infatuation with G&S was by no means a case of artistic licence – in real life, he’d go on to marry the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company singer Sybil Evers, and in 1959 chose The Yeomen of the Guard Overture as his favourite track on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs.
8. 2014: From bow to snow
Skier Vanessa Vanakorn could only ever dream of grabbing a medal in the giant slalom at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. As it was, she came 67th, last out of all those who successfully made it down the course twice and some 50 seconds behind the winner. Nonetheless, even that was no little achievement for Vanakorn, whom most people knew better as the British-Singaporean violinist Vanessa-Mae.
Having racked up a fortune from a young age with recordings ranging from Beethoven to Donna Summer, Mae revealed in her 30s that her next big ambition was to represent Thailand, her father’s birth country, on the snowy slopes. And, with Olympic rules allowing every country to enter at least one competitor into the giant slalom, Thailand’s lack of skiers of note afforded her a clear path to doing so. ‘With my limited experience at my age I’m happy I made it down,’ she reflected afterwards. ‘It was kind of rock and roll because I nearly crashed out three times.’
7. 1936: Strauss’s podium odium
‘I am whiling away the boredom of the advent season by composing an Olympic Hymn for the plebs – I of all people, who hate and despise sports.’ These were the words of Richard Strauss, the least likely of all composers to have had a connection with the Olympics. Perhaps even more surprising was that he was there in person to conduct the work at the Olympics opening ceremony in Berlin on 1 August 1936. Astonishing, really, as only the year before he had been unceremoniously sacked as president of the Reich Chamber of Musicians for criticising the Nazi regime.
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One suspects he was deemed simply too prestigious a part of Hitler’s notorious Olympic showcase to be omitted. He certainly gave himself plenty to play with, scoring his Olympic Hymn for huge choral and orchestral forces including ‘four trumpets, multiplied by four if possible…’.
By the way, we were interested but not totally surprised to see Strauss's name cropping up a lot when we asked orchestral musicians to name their favourite pieces to perform.
More greatest Olympic musical moments
6. 1956: A revolutionary approach
A different Strauss – Johann II – was partly to thank for bringing a little Olympic glory to Czechoslovakia in Melbourne in 1956. When, only two years earlier, Olga Fikotová took up the discus at university in Prague, veteran coach Otakar Jandera not only saw the potential of the 5'11" athlete but also worked out a canny way of helping her develop the sense of rhythm needed to spin effectively in the circle before throwing.
‘He started off by playing the Blue Danube over and over again on the stadium loudspeakers and had me making turns,’ remembered Fikotová later. Masterful, though surely not even Jandera could have possibly foreseen his rookie athlete winning the gold medal with a new Olympic record within such a short space of time.
5. 2012: Elgar’s introduction and Valegro
Elgar’s keen interest in horses revolved largely around whether or not they were winning him a few bob in the 3.30 at Worcester. Nonetheless, one likes to think that he’d have been mighty proud to know that, 78 years after his death, one would be ridden to Olympic gold to the sound of his music. The winner of that gold was Charlotte Dujardin who, at London’s Greenwich Park, partnered Valegro to victory in the Individual Dressage – the ‘dancing horse’ event – to a medley that included Vaughan Williams, Holst, The Great Escape, the James Bond theme ‘Live and Let Die’ and, rounding it all off, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
‘I was lucky to be able to work with composer Tom Hunt,’ Dujardin tells BBC Music. ‘It always starts with working out a routine to suit the horse and what I feel would work best. But I knew that competing in front of a home crowd at the Olympics would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so it felt only natural to be as patriotic and sentimental as possible! We worked hard to adapt both routine and music to what I had in my mind, but it is thanks to Tom’s talent that we could pull everything seamlessly together.’
And did Valegro himself like the music? ‘Horses are incredibly sensitive souls, and I do believe they understand what’s being asked of them, whether that be music, rhythm and also when the big moments come around. Blueberry [the stable name for Valegro] is such a performer and he absolutely blossomed under the atmosphere.’
A troubling postscript to this story: On 23 July 2024, Charlotte Dujardin withdrew from the 2024 Summer Olympics, after receiving a provisional suspension over animal cruelty allegations.
These allegations came after a video emerged, seeming to show Dujardin repeatedly whipping a horse during training. Dujardin has since received an indefinite provisional ban from competition by the International Federation for Euqestrian Sports (FEI), the British Equestrian Federation and British Dressage while an investigation is pursued. In a statement, Dujardin said she was 'deeply ashamed' and that the behaviour 'was completely out of character and does not reflect how I train my horses or coach my pupils'.
4. 2008: Heard but not seen
Los Angeles marked 1984 with 84 pianos (see below). Some 24 years later, Beijing went for a similar numerical trick, with 2008 drummers beating in time at its dazzling opening ceremony at the Bird’s Nest stadium. Lang Lang was another of the evening’s star turns, the 26-year-old pianist looking entirely unfazed by playing in front of a TV audience of 2.3 billion people.
And seven-year-old Yang Peiyi also grabbed the headlines, albeit in a less fortunate manner – chosen to sing ‘Ode to the Motherland’, the sweet-voiced Peiyi was deemed not pretty enough for TV by the authorities, who replaced her on stage with a more camera-friendly, lip-synching Lin Miaoke. Confidence mercifully still intact, Peiyi went on to release her debut album the following year.
3. 2012 Rattle passes the baton
Why have just one world-famous conductor when you can have two? First up at the London 2012 opening ceremony was Sir Simon Rattle who, five years ahead of becoming music director of the London Symphony Orchestra, led his future charges in Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire – a rendition adorned by the comic turn of Rowan Atkinson, in Mr Bean mode, on the synthesiser.
And then, at the more serious end of the ceremony, came the appearance of the great Daniel Barenboim as one of the eight notables carrying the Olympic Flag into position. With each of the eight having been chosen as the representative of an Olympic value, Barenboim, founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to promote peaceful co-existence between Israeli and Arab musicians, was there as a symbol of ‘harmony in place of discord’. It had been a busy evening for the maestro, who had hotfooted it from, appropriately, west to east London after conducting his orchestra in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the BBC Proms.
2. 1984: Ravel, and the art of timing
Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were also quite handy at moving in time to music. When, at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics in 1984, the British ice dancers racked up high scores for their Rimsky-Korsakov Capriccio espagnol-inspired original set piece routine, a gold medal already looked likely. And the best was yet to come: the free dance, skated to Maurice Ravel’s iconic Boléro.
But when the big moment arrived, the millions of Brits tuning in to watch on TV were surprised to see the pair spend the first few seconds of the music kneeling on the ice, swaying to and fro. What was going on?
Answer: rules stated that a free dance routine was not allowed to be more than 4 minutes 10 seconds long, but distilling Ravel’s 15-minute masterpiece down to less than 4 minutes 18 seconds had proved impossible. Therefore, as a routine doesn’t officially start until the blade of a skate touches the ice, there was only one thing for it… The judges’ approval was revealed by a row of perfect sixes, as Torvill and Dean glided to gold and Ravel’s Boléro soared to unprecedented popularity in the UK.
And... top of our greatest Olympic musical moments is...
1. 1984: Summon John Williams
Los Angeles rolled out the big guns for the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Proceedings began with a new ‘Welcome’ song by film composer Marvin Hamlisch, while the entry of the Olympic torch was accompanied by Philip Glass conducting his own The Olympian. No fewer than 84 grand pianos, meanwhile, were wheeled out for George Gershwin’s freewheeling, jazz-infused masterpiece, Rhapsody in Blue.
This was also the moment when the great film composer John Williams began to make his indelible mark on the Olympics, as the nations paraded into the stadium to his Olympic Fanfare and Theme. Williams would go on to write music for three further Olympics: Olympic Spirit for Seoul, 1988; Summon the Heroes for Atlanta, 1996; and Call of the Champions for the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City, 2002. With the Olympics heading back to Los Angeles in 2028, don’t bet on him having finished yet.
