The eccentric struggle of 32 writers to win Olympic gold at the Paris 1924 Games

Every hero needs a poet. It has always been thus: in classical antiquity and also a century ago, at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games, the VIII modern Olympiad. It is there that Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the soul and mastermind of the Olympic revival, decided to bring writers closer to a new religion called sport. That is why he created an Olympic discipline whose medals were worth as much as those awarded in athletics, wrestling, cycling, or swimming: literature.

Thirty-two writers will compete for gold, silver and bronze. It will be a competition where a prestigious jury containing several Nobel Prize winners, six members of the French Academy and extravagant characters such as the writers Gabriele D’Annunzio and Princess Bibesco will choose the best lyrical, dramatic or narrative works inspired by the sporting ideal. It took place 100 years ago but soon fell into oblivion. However, French writer Louis Chevaillier has reconstructed that competition in an essay, Les Jeux Olympiques de littérature, which breaks down that romantic attempt to generate an epic discourse for the new pagan religion of modernity, endowed with oaths, sacred fire, ceremonials, and fervent believers.

The first thing that surprises is the jury. This is serious. The Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck, a Nobel Prize winner and weightlifter in his youth, stands out. Paul Valéry, pure poet and sensitive soul who never recovered from his chance encounter, aged 19, with a Catalan woman crossing an obscure street in Genoa and with whom he fell in love to the extent that he could not even speak to her, shines with opalescent light. He decided to renounce love and other idols forever: this was the so-called Night of Genoa.

The jury also includes the illustrious Valencian novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, exiled in France as a republican and anticlerical after General Primo de Rivera came to power in Spain a year earlier. There are more names. Paul Claudel, a poet overflowing with lyricism and religious mysticism. Countess Anna de Noailles, alias of the Romanian princess Hélène Bibesco, passionate about poetry, patron of the arts and very popular in the literary salons of Paris.

Also on the jury is the Philo fascist whirlwind of Gabriele d’Annunzio, il comandante: poet, aesthete, dandy, fighter pilot, fencer, militarist, ultranationalist and governor of Fiume, a short-lived state that was annexed to Italy by Benito Mussolini in a territory that today is part of Croatia. There are two other distinguished women: the first to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swede Selma Lagerlöf, and the New York novelist Edith Wharton, a respected writer to whom Yale awarded its first female honoris causa.

Also present are the Soviet novelist Dimitry Merezhkovsky, the Austrian Hanus Jelínek, the Norwegian Johan Bojer, and the Chinese Lu Cheng-hsiang, who is a diplomat, clergyman, minister, writer, and who has a face and the look of a novel.

Thirty judges will select the best literary work. Twenty thousand words of prose or 1,000 verses. There are three Olympic medals at stake and too many dreamers are competing for them: writers enlightened by the ideal — whatever it may be — in a time drunk with ideals. For example, Henry de Montherlant. From the profile Chevaillier draws of him it is difficult not to retain the most grotesque gestures: that at the end of the Great War, with the rainy streets of Paris full of orphans, widows and mutilated soldiers, he continued to wear his military uniform for several months. That he is proud to say that his spirit drinks from three sources: the first, Catholicism, the writers of ancient Rome, and the brave spirit of the Spanish bullfights; the second, war, and the third, sport. He does not understand literature without controversy and action, such as leading the construction of an ossuary for the dead of Verdun.

And that he despises that horrible cocktail shaker where he places utopia, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the concepts of freedom and progress, Romanticism, pacifism, cosmopolitanism and all the disorders that lead to the worst of isms: Bolshevism; and that instead he adores Rome and Greece, the Renaissance and the concepts of tradition, authority, and the best of isms: nationalism.

Through an old bookstore I pick up his worn volume: 488 pages bound in hardcover from Gallimard. Les olympiques, Henry de Montherlant, 1946. There, amid the smell of dust, never reissued, sleeps the book that the 29-year-old submitted to the Paris Olympic competition: Le paradis à l’ombre des épées. Page 163: “If the development of every man requires a point of support outside himself, that point of support will be for you the homeland. In the stadiums, by increasing your courage, you prepare yourselves — even unwittingly — to consolidate the fatherland. Through sport you become part of the fatherland without even thinking about it, which is perhaps the wisest way to join it.”

One of his competitors is the Englishman Robert Graves, still without published work. Someday he will write I, Claudius and will reserve for himself a place of honor in the Parnassus of the classics. But at the moment, Graves is just a young man who has suffered boarding school, the inequalities of class, and the serious wounds caused by a shell in the trenches of the Great War. To the Olympic test he submits a long poem of 280 lines. It is entitled At the Games and is a dialogue between two old soldiers, an Englishman and a Frenchman, who meet again at the Olympics to watch a boxing match.

The Frenchman says: “War is often a sport.”

The Englishman replies: “And sometimes sport is war.”

The titles of other works submitted to the competition reflect the ideal pursued: Towards the God of Olympia; The Triumph of the Athlete; At the Top; Olympic Odes; Olympic Hymn; Exuberant Youth in the Open Air; To the Glory of Sports; The Land Where the Rose Grows; The Battle; The Glorious Uncertainty.

Never has such a level been witnessed, either in the celebrity of the jury or in the number of participants. It is true that since the 1912 Olympics there have been art and literature events included in the Games. However, it is not comparable to what is decided in the Grand Palais in Paris. In Stockholm, in 1912, there were seven participating writers and the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, inventor of the modern Games, won the gold medal under a pseudonym. In Antwerp, in 1920, only three pens competed for the gold, which was won by the Italian poet Raniero Nicolai with his Olympic Songs.

But at Paris 1924, thirty-two writers compete. They represent 10 countries. And so, the hard deliberation begins. It is not war drums the jury is looking for. Not the bellicosity of Montherlant’s swords. Not the frank harshness of Graves. They prefer something lighter in a raging Europe, a festering world. And there emerges the opportunity of an unknown. A poet with droopy eyelids.

He is 32 years old and has bristly hair. He was born in Burgundy. He used to be called Charles Louis Prosper Guyot, but now he styles himself Géo-Charles. He used to play soccer; then he fought in the war and the Germans imprisoned him for four years in the Oberhausen concentration camp. He writes in magazines, admires Tristan Tzara, has published a book of poems entitled Sports. To the Paris 1924 competition he sends a 70-page book entitled Jeux olympiques, which is a kind of theatrical poetry or poetic theater. It is strange. But the fact is that he wins the gold.

They send him a medal in the mail. And he is indignant because he expected to be crowned in the Olympic stadium with the honors of any other athlete. So he mails the medal back to the Olympic committee; the ego. And the committee has no choice but to organize an official ceremony. Gold for Géo-Charles; two silvers, for the British author Dorothy Margaret Stuart and the Danish novelist Josef Petersen; and two bronzes for the French poet Charles Anthoine Gonnet and the Dublin physician Oliver St. John Gogarty.

That should be the end of the story. But there is a coda. Unexpected. Like a deadly backflip and ideological pirouette. Géo-Charles, Literature champion in Paris 1924, will renege on the Olympic spirit and its false promise of universal peace four years later. Géo-Charles preferred instead to attend the Bolshevik Spartakiades in Moscow, which challenged the bourgeois Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Géo-Charles will then write that nothing remains of the old social ideal that underlay the Olympic Games. A medalist’s word.

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