Trade Fact of the Week: The Paris Olympics has 329 medal events.

July 24, 2024
Ed Gresser

FACT: The Paris Olympics has 329 medal events.

THE NUMBERS: National Anthems –

First adopted:	‘Het Wilhelmus,’ Netherlands, 1572
First ‘official’:	La Marseillaise, France, 1792
Longest continuous use:	God Save the King, UK, 1745
Oldest lyrics:	Kimi Ga Yo, Japan, c. 750
Newest:	South Sudan Oyee!, South Sudan, 2011

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Even after 100 years, Paris/1924 has a strong claim for the best U.S. “away” Olympics ever. That year’s awe-inspiring team, featuring — among many — Hawaiian surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku, Hollywood action-hero Johnny Weissmuller, women’s pro tennis pioneer Helen Wills Moody, and first African-American gold medalist DeHart Hubbard, won 45 of the summer’s 129 gold medals. Only the Mexico City/1968 team has matched that total, and by then there were 210 medal events. As a sample, here’s the NYT’s Paris correspondent joyfully reporting demoralized French crowds booing the U.S. rugby team after its 17-3 finals win (adding that “the three points scored by the French were lucky”) and concluding that after a rare U.S. silver:

“[W]hen a non-American winner was called up for the official tribute, the crowd cheered lustily, and the band ceased to play the Star-Spangled Banner for a moment.”

A century on, Paris/2024 has 329 medal events, from Friday’s first archery shots to the women’s marathon tape on the 11th. So expect a lot of antheming as Team USA meets its familiar rivals: Caribbean sprinters, Aussie swimmers, Southeast Asian boxers and badminton aces, Chinese divers and gymnasts, East African distance stars, Japan’s martial artists, Brit cyclers and rowers, South American and Baltic basketballers, Ukraine’s sentimental favorites in track and boxing, France’s high-expectations home team – tipped by a personality no less than President Macron for their most medals since the 31 golds of 1900 – et al. Specifically, an Olympic anthem arrangement has to be 80 seconds or less. So even if there are no ties, expect six and a half hours of music, nearly as much as all the track races combined. Whose idea was this, anyway? Here you go:

Warmups: Like the Red Cross (1863), the metric system (1875), international patent and copyright agreements (1883 & 1886), time zones (1884), and Nobel Prizes (1895), the Olympics (1896) are a survivor of the pre-World War I “globalization” era, centered on Europe and organized by aristocrats and business executives as much as by governments.

The first “anthems,” meanwhile, are a bit older and weren’t originally composed for ‘nations’ as such, but for European royal families. The earliest, Het Wilhelmus, is a 15-verse marathon honoring the House of Orange. Dating to 1572, it stood alone for 170 years until joined by Britain’s God Save the King (the anthem in longest continuous use) in 1745. France’s La Marseillaise (1792) seems to be the first specifically for a country rather than a ruling family, but also has a long discontinuity. (Banned by Napoleon and subsequent Bourbons, not re-designated until the 1870s.) Japan’s Kimi Ga Yo, officially adopted in 1879 as a Meiji-era westernizing reform, laps the field in Katie Ledecky-like style for the most venerable lyrics, drawn from a 1250-year-old poem recorded in the Heian anthology Kokinshu.

Qualifying Heats: Anthems spread worldwide a bit later. The Ottoman Empire hired an Italian bandleader to write an anthem in 1844; two founders of newly independent Liberia wrote one in 1847; Francisco Acuna wrote two, Uruguay’s and Paraguay’s, in 1833 and 1846. China, though austerely declining for a while, gave in after the 1912 nationalist revolution. Americans were technically even later adopters: though frequently played in the 19th century and chosen as the military anthem under the Wilson administration, the SSB only got official “national” designation in 1931. The newest is South Sudan Oyee!, composed by University of Juba students for independence in 2011. Given the South Sudan basketball team’s remarkable pre-Olympics matches, SSO! has at least a long-shot hope for an August 11th performance.

Medal Round: How, then, did ‘country-specific’ anthems join up with the ‘internationalist’ Olympics? The abstract “playing anthems at sports events” concept has several origins. Americans for example note regular SSB performance at sports events since the 1918 World Series, but Wales says they started it at a 1905 rugby match with New Zealand. Probably it has multiple independent authors. As to the Olympics, the aggravated French crowds of 1924 had only themselves to blame. It was their government’s idea to launch the “playing anthems at medal ceremonies” concept as a new thing for that year’s Paris Games, and it has held on ever since.

Almost all anthems use the Western military-march or hymnal arrangements popular in the 19th century, though Latin America has a few experiments with operatic style, and some Persian Gulf monarchies use concise trumpet flourishes. Few concede anything to modern musical forms or non-western music theory: Jamaica’s Week 2 sprinters will hear no reggae on the stand, Indonesian and Malaysian badminton standouts no gamelan, and Japanese judoka and Nadashiko stars no shakuhachi solo. South Asia is an exception, with India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka all at times using South Asian musical forms.

How good are anthems as music? The BBC’s Music Magazine, bravely or recklessly attempting a ranking for quality and emotional impact last month, put Het Wilhelmus first by virtue of longevity, with the SSB second, La M. third, and Argentina’s Himno Nacional Argentina fourth. Next come Germany’s Das Lied der Deutschen, Italy’s similarly titled Canto degli Italiani, and Kimi Ga Yo, with Kenya, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Liechtenstein, South Africa, Spain, Russia, and Wales next. (“As stirring as it gets — even the stoniest-hearted Englishman surely feels the hairs standing on the back of his neck at the sound of ‘Gwlad! Gwlad!’” Perhaps so.) The BBC’s top 14…

And if there were “last-place” medals –

If Paris/1924 has a claim for the best U.S. “away” team, what’s the best of the nine “home” teams? LA/1984 for top modern-era medal count? Lake Placid/1980 for inspiration? Your call, of course, but don’t let raw medal counts trick you into picking St. Louis/1904.

In that third Olympiad, the U.S. team won 239 of the 280 possible medals, but the garishly big total is more travesty than triumph. The bumbling business group that ran the Games strung them out for four months, from July to November, to build publicity for a money-losing World’s Fair they were managing at the same time. Few foreign delegations could afford the lodging bill, so 523 of the Games’ 651 competitors were Americans. The managers later claimed this didn’t matter since U.S. athletes were so good that foreigners wouldn’t have won much anyway. (Defiant sample: “It is doubtful, indeed, if a single Frenchman could have finished even fourth in any of the events”; conceding that “one” Brit had a chance, they add “and that man’s name was Shrubb.”) The Games’ many lowlights, from swimming events held in a muddy temporary pond to competitions invented on the spot with crowd-sourced competitors, all culminate in the infamous 1904 Marathon, whose official record begins with a bang — “The Marathon race, from a medical standpoint, demonstrated that drugs are of much benefit to athletes along the road” — and only gets better as it recounts a race which, 120 years and 30 Games later, still has a good bid for “worst-run, most dangerous Olympic event ever held”.

* Two of the 31 runners nearly died. Eventual winner Thomas Hicks was, in fact, almost killed by his managers, who refused to give him any water and instead made him drink an experimental “energy” potion made of raw eggs, brandy, and strychnine. (A kind of rat poison). Hicks began to hallucinate at 20 miles, became obsessed with food, and collapsed after crossing the finish line. He finished at 3:28:53, the slowest winning time in Olympic history by more than half an hour, and spent the next two weeks in a hospital.

* Two more contestants collapsed from heat, dehydration, and dust kicked up by automobiles on the course, ten dropped out with stomach cramps after drinking contaminated water, and a loose dog chased another man off the course.

* Clever New Yorker Fred Lorz dropped out after 9 miles, hitched a ride on a car until he was close to the finish line, then jumped back in and pretended he won. He temporarily got the medal, but they later took it back and gave it to Hicks.

The St. Louis Committee’s official report, with the marathon at pp. 45-67. See also page 15 for the sour grapes-ing on French and British athletes…

Horrified Runner’s World looks back, a lot more objectively, at the worst race ever…

The IOC’s official take begins “Unfortunately…” and says as little as possible…