In 1899 an angry huddle of Parisian writers and artists signed a letter in which they denounced the arrival in their beloved city of a vast and hideous object: a monstrous tower, designed and erected by an engineer named Eiffel.
By allowing the abomination to be built, the signatories insisted, Paris was guilty of “making itself irreparably ugly and bringing dishonour to itself”, and was now henceforth cursed to live under “the odious shadow of this odious column of bolted metal”.
Not satisfied with a group effort, some writers fired off their own broadsides, declaring the tower a “tragic street lamp” and a “giant ungainly skeleton”.
Few, however, felt more outrage than novelist and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans. “From whatever angle one looks, this work tells lies,” he wrote in his lengthy vivisection of the tower. “It is 300m high and appears to be 100m; it is finished, and appears to be hardly begun”, leaving one with the overwhelming impression that it was “a carcass waiting to be filled by freestone or bricks”.
Worse, however, the tower, built by a wealthy railwayman, was a monument to the new religion of capitalism, “a church consecrated to the cult of gold... In this case, its strongbox material ... its oil-well form, its skeleton like a huge dredger designed for extracting gold-bearing silts from the stock markets, would be explained. It would be the spire of Our Lady of Second-Hand Trading”.
The rest of his evisceration is worth reading, but you’ll have to look for it. Today, like most of the other critics, he is a figure known only to academics, Google and columnists with deadlines. But the tower he loathed is known and loved by hundreds of millions; a thing as French as baguettes and burning cars in the banlieues; its unmoving iron bulk standing as a paradoxical reminder that everything changes.
Changing Games
Certainly, the Olympic Games taking place in its “odious shadow” are changing, and changing fast. Then again, change has been the modern Olympics’ only constant, right from when it was founded in 1896 as a celebration of the human spirit, as long as those humans were all male and mostly lived in Western Europe.
Just four years later, for example, it had transformed into a celebration of poodle-clipping (more of this in a moment), before becoming a celebration of athleticism, before transforming into its current shape: a celebration of whichever friend of yours still has either a television set or subscribes to a streaming service.
And soon it will transform again, as the International Olympic Committee tries to woo younger viewers fast losing interest in the Games: last month it announced that Saudi Arabia would host the first Olympic Esports Games next year, an excellent choice given how much the kingdom has in common with computer games, from misogyny to murdering people with impunity.
This, of course, is the point at which many purists will ask how someone twitching their thumbs can win roughly the same sort of medal as someone who’s run 100m in under 10 seconds or flung themselves backwards down a beam.
And yet, with all due respect to their concerns, it’s tough to argue that some events are too silly to feature in the Games when we live in a world in which synchronised swimming exists, a sport entirely dedicated to imagining what it might look like if mermaids were North Korean.
Appeals to a chiselled, Spartan past, likewise tend to fall apart in the face of the Olympics’ actual history, such as the attempt in 1900 to get poodle-clipping included in future games. The event didn’t take off, perhaps because of the potential for doping scandals (nobody wants to see a stadium full of poodles drugged into drooling compliance) but that didn’t stop the Games from trying to celebrate the mind as well as the body.
From 1912 to 1948, for example, you could win an Olympic medal for literature, architecture, music, painting and sculpture, as long as it was more or less about sport. You probably don’t recognise the name of Yrjö Lindegren, but he will forever be the last Olympian to win a gold medal for town planning. And let us not forget Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Games, who clinched gold in 1912 for his poem Ode to Sport, after entering it under two pseudonyms, which was obviously not dodgy at all.
(I read its nine stanzas so you don’t have to, including lines like “O Sport, you are Joy! At your behest, flesh dances and eyes smile”. I can only assume it’s better in French, or that dancing flesh was slightly less horrifying in 1912.)
Yes, we can pretend elite sport is pure and abstract, a form of physics based on microseconds and joules of energy; but ultimately it’s a thing we’ve made, which means it will always be a reflection of ourselves and the times we live in.
If we love our poodles, then we will delight in seeing them clipped competitively. If our world has plunged into darkness and barbarism, as Europe did between 1914 and 1945, then it will feel right for the consolations of art to stand alongside rugged sport.
And if we live in a world run by computers and owned by the people who control them, well is it so silly to include a bit of thumb-twitching?
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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