99% Invisible - The Art of the Olympics

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

The 2024 Paris Olympics are currently under way, and we thought we’d play two stories from the 99% Invisible archives about the art of the Olympics.First up, a story about the design and iconography of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Then, Kurt Kohlstedt tells us about Olympic poetry.The Art of the Olympics

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The Paris Olympics kicked off last week, and the opening ceremonies were something else. They were awesome. The metal band Gojira blasted pyrotechnics from a castle alongside a headless Marie Antoinette. Celine Dion sang at the base of the Eiffel Tower. A masked torchbearer ran on the rooftops like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. And yes, there was an animal cruelty-free symbolic dove release. A mysterious figure rode on a metal horse down the Seine.

Unfurling massive dove wings. It was weird and wonderful. This week we're presenting a freshly remixed pair of older Olympic stories from 99PI. We'll hear more about some long-lost Olympic events that we think should definitely be brought back. But first, this 2017 episode about the iconic design of the 1968 Games in Mexico City. Enjoy. The United States leads the Olympics in medal awards and is just about supreme in the sprint races. On October 16, 1968, American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos climbed onto the podium

at the Mexico City Olympics to accept their medals. Yesterday, they came in first and third in the 200-meter dash. Smith had won gold. Carlos had won bronze. As the national anthem began to play, the men, both African-American, bowed their heads and raised their fists in the Black Power Salute. That's producer Claire Mullen. They kept their fists raised

until the last notes of the anthem faded away. The gesture was a statement of Black pride and defiance. It's still considered one of the most overtly political statements made in the history of the modern Olympic Games. But that wasn't the only politically significant moment at the Olympics that year. A Mexican hurdler named Enriqueta Basilio became the first woman to ever light the Olympic cauldron. A Czech gymnast beat out Soviet gymnasts for the overall women's title, just two months after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was also the first time a Latin American city, or even a Spanish-speaking country,

had hosted the Games. It was a big deal to have hundreds of thousands of international travelers come visit Mexico. The Mexican government saw the Olympics as an announcement to the world. Mexico City had arrived as a major international metropolis. So almost everything about the 1968 Olympics felt revolutionary. Including the design of it.

The images and logos associated with the 1968 Olympics were ubiquitous at the time. They were plastered all over the city. This complete design campaign would become one of the most famous in Olympic history, and it would set a whole new standard for games to come. But these government-commissioned designs would also be co-opted by local activists

who wanted to reveal the darker political reality in Mexico that was hidden behind the beautiful, glossy imagery of the 1968 games. In the decades leading up to the 1968 Olympics, Mexico had gone through a period of major economic growth. It became known as the Mexican Miracle. The Mexican Miracle typically, you know, historians conventionally speak

about it as a period spanning from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. The country had rapidly industrialized, rapidly urbanized, and its capital, Mexico City, had grown into this enormous, sprawling metropolis. The city grew faster than it ever had in Mexico's modern history.

That's Luis Castañeda. He's the author of Spectacular Mexico, Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics. Because of its size and layout, Mexico City was a challenging place to host a major international event like the Olympics. Mexico City was sprawling and spreading, still at the height of its miracle. I mean, even until the Olympics are literally about to happen, there are all these doubts

about whether the Mexican government will be organized enough to undertake the whole spectacle of that magnitude. The Olympic organizers needed to show that their metropolis was safe, navigable, cohesive, and, you know, exciting. They wanted to create a visual identity for the Olympics to really sell Mexico City to all these visitors seeing it for the Olympics to really sell Mexico City to all these visitors seeing it for the first time. So they decided to hold an international competition to find a designer who would create a logo

and graphic design campaign for the Olympics. They wanted something that looked cosmopolitan and contemporary and distinctly Mexican. And this is where an unlikely character comes in. I'm Lance Wyman. I'm a designer. I work here in New York. In 1966, Lance Wyman was a 29-year-old graphic designer. When he heard about the competition, he knew that he and his design partner, Peter Murdock, had to get on the short list of contenders. This list included design teams from all over the world who would come down to Mexico City for a two-week trial run. After their two

weeks, each team would present their design for consideration. And we got on the list to go down in November of 1966 and Peter and I had just started out we didn't have any money so we could only afford one-way tickets. They hopped on the plane with their one-way tickets and landed in Mexico City. By the way, neither of them had ever visited Mexico before. They didn't really know anything about the country. If they were going to design a logo to represent Mexico, Wyman and Murdoch would have to learn a lot and fast.

They started where most tourists start, by visiting museums. They spent a lot of time at the Museum of Anthropology, where they studied artifacts from pre-Columbian Mexico, like the Aztec Sunstone and ancient Mayan murals. I actually was floored by some of the early cultures because they were doing things in a contemporary way with geometry and with graphics. The bold lines and bright colors and geometric shapes reminded Wyman of the kind of op art that was popular among contemporary artists back in New York. Op art, or optical art, uses contrast, geometry, and other tricks to give the viewer the impression of movement. And so, informed by both indigenous artifacts and modern op art, Wyman came up with a logo

that riffed on the five rings of the Olympic symbol. I realized that the geometry of the five rings could be integrated with the year of the event, 68. He superimposed the digits six and eight over the classic Olympic rings. The circles on the rings radiated out from the circles in the digits and it created a hypnotic stripe effect. And from that I developed the typography to make the word Mexico. It's this very groovy looking typography made of three parallel stripes. Wyman created

a logo that he considered both very modern and quintessentially Mexican. The end of the two weeks came and we started making prints of the Mexico 68 logotype and people from publications and people from the public relations, they wanted copies of it. And we were working like crazy making copies and doing all of that. And then Wyman realized that no one actually told him yet if he had the job. So he asked one of the organizers. I said, did we win? He goes, oh, I guess so.

Wyman had created a stunning logo and typeface for the competition. But choosing this white guy who had never been to Mexico before was a bit problematic. It's not that unusual for people not born in Mexico, for artists and people in culture and the arts to be involved with these kinds of state-sponsored campaigns. It's not entirely unprecedented, but it's still a very unique situation, especially given the fact that this is a very, very significant project. That's author Luis Castañeda again. What is very striking, almost shocking perhaps, is that the fact that of course Lance Wyman

is very much unproven as a designer. He's very young, he hasn't had much time to do much yet. And yet somehow he is given this very high degree of responsibility as part of the design campaign. Wyman and Murdoch ended up staying in Mexico for two years to work on the campaign. And, along with a team of designers, many of them Mexican, they came up with ways to use their typeface, logo, and other designs all over the city. The hypnotic stripes were turned into striped uniforms for the event's workers and volunteers.

The patterns and colors used in the logo ended up on hats, postage stamps, balloons, all sorts of products to hype the impending games. And these objects range from very small objects, all kinds of memorabilia, you know, things from ashtrays and furniture or apparel, all the way to the stadiums. Stadiums across the city were painted with these radiating op art patterns. Bright colors decorated sidewalks and walls and plazas. And these bright hypnotic designs didn't just give the Olympic games a visual coherence. The graphic design language of the Olympics expanded into an entire system that helped visitors navigate the massive metropolis. To do this, Wyman made simple color-coded icons to represent every sporting event.

They were not stick figures, but they were focused more on a part of the body or a piece of the equipment or a combination of the two. Gymnastics, for example, was represented by a hand gripping a single suspended ring. Track and field had its icon, boxing had its icon. So on the ticket, you knew what your ticket was for by the icon only. So if you're visiting from Japan and didn't speak any Spanish you'd see say the soccer icon on a green background and you'd follow the green signs to the stadium where the soccer would be. And this system wasn't just for sports. Wyman and the team made universally understandable icons for

19 cultural events happening around the city as well. We had children's painting, we had folk dancing, we had science programming. By following these cultural icons, visitors could continue to entertain themselves and explore the city after the sporting events were over. The 1968 Olympics had been decreed Los Juegos de la Paz, the Games of Peace. So Wyman designed a little outline of a dove which shop owners all over the city were given to stick in their windows. Between the logo, the typeface, the colors, the icons, and the doves, Wyman created a visual identity that saturated the whole city. It was everywhere.

It was a total design campaign. Total design campaign, right? There's the idea of total design, that every single thing, idea, place, object associated with the Olympics is immediately and powerfully recognizable as part of a whole. And the completeness of the campaign would set a precedent for years to come. I think it's safe to say that although design and architecture and the arts in general had been very powerfully associated with Olympics before Mexico 68, it's really after Mexico 60 that it becomes a kind of standard expectation of design campaigns associated with these kinds of events. While Lance Wyman was designing this extensive campaign, he was holed up, swamped with work, and he really didn't get a chance to go out much. Nose to the grindstone, really,

almost through the whole thing. We were pretty isolated at the Olympic Committee. He didn't see the protest movement growing in the city around him. The movement was led by students who believed the long-ruling institutional revolutionary party catered to wealthy Mexicans rather than the poor, rural, and working class. The country had been experiencing huge economic growth, but millions of people had been left behind. The Mexican miracle hadn't reached everyone. The government was talking of the Mexican miracle, even though in the reality of those days,

things were not as happy as they appeared. These are excerpts from interviews with students involved in the protests against Mexico's single-party government, courtesy of our friends at Radio Diaries. In the 60s, we were still a country where the government controlled everything. Presidents were the equivalent of monarchs. I mean, it was forbidden to demonstrate. You could not go and express your dissent. And for the students, protesting the government meant protesting against the Olympics themselves. to demonstrate. You could not go and express your dissent. And for the students, protesting the government meant protesting against the Olympics themselves, the so-called Games of Peace.

Olympics are, I think maybe by design, by definition, always about propaganda on some level or another. And so what the Olympics sought to present as a kind of happy picture of social harmony and as a kind of very sanitized idea of how modernization happens was of course not the reality of what many of these inhabitants of the city experienced. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets repeatedly throughout 1968. We were urban middle class, low middle class, bunch of young people. It was in a symbolic way the clash of a new Mexico and a new Mexico. You have a middle class with eyes closed and a group of students saying this was not a democracy and this is not working. Again and again police had come out and violently dispersed protesters with clouds of tear gas.

As the Olympics neared and as international attention turned towards Mexico City, the government was desperate to make the unrest go away. On October 2nd, just 10 days before the Games of Peace were set to begin, thousands of students gathered at Tlatelolco Square in the northeast of Mexico City to demand the Games of Peace were set to begin, thousands of students gathered at Tlatelolco Square in the northeast of Mexico City to demand the release of people who had been locked up at a previous protest. It was a quiet gathering of people with signs, walking slowly around the plaza. And we looked back and there was all these infantry troops. They started to advance towards the crowd.

And at some point we heard some shots. We didn't know where they came from. And seconds later, how do you say in English, all hell broke loose. Soldiers opened fire on the protesters. To this day, we don't know exactly how many students died in the massacre, but the number is likely in the hundreds. The scene was cleared before there could be an accurate body count. The blood was washed away.

Thousands of protesters were arrested and locked up. The government took great pains to cover their tracks. The amount of students who were shot and many others who were imprisoned for quite some time was covered up. The government claimed that the students had fired first to provoke the military. Evidence has since come to light that disproves that claim. It's an extremely shocking event for a long time, kind of suppressed in Mexican national memory.

And in many ways, it is the crux of the crisis that sets the stage for the, in a very, very dramatic sense for the Olympics themselves. The massacre was so horribly devastating that, of course, Lance Wyman heard about it. When I heard about it, and how severe it was, it was a difficult situation because I felt I was working for the government and I couldn't do anything about it. But he says he really empathized with the students. I couldn't do anything about it. But he says he really empathized with the students. I wasn't much older than they were,

so I had that feeling that I might have felt good if I just walked away from the whole thing. Wyman felt stuck in the middle. But in a way, he didn't need to choose between the government and the protesters. His designs found a way to serve both sides. Students began imitating Wyman's images and co-opting them. They took a poster he made with a silhouetted image of runners racing and turned it into

silhouettes of troops beating people with batons. They used his signature typography to create anti-government posters. And that very simple image of a dove in all the shop windows? Students went around the city, spraying a small burst of bright red in all the shop windows, students went around the city spraying a small burst of bright red paint over the dove's chest, like it had been shot. They were playing with the propaganda of the Olympics and hinting at a darker political reality. And Wyman, he liked it. He made a design campaign so ubiquitous, so resonant, that the resistance could use it too.

And I've always been questioned, well, why do you feel good about that? And I guess that's why, because I was in a situation where I was kind of torn. I was very sympathetic as far as what was happening to the students, but I was also very not wanting to see the Olympics be stopped. And they weren't stopped. On October 12, 1968, the Games began on schedule. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. On October 12, 1968, the Olympic Games of Mexico were inaugurated.

The 1968 Olympics went on to become one of the most important in the history of the games, marked not only by athletic achievement, but by open political defiance. I represented black America. I'm very proud to be a black man and also to have won the gold medal Mexico 68 also set a new precedent for how governments would use design to promote their country's image to the international community For better or for worse the 68 games also left a permanent mark on Mexico City's infrastructure The 68 games also left a permanent mark on Mexico City's infrastructure. Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world. It's the largest metropolitan area in North America. Around 4.4 million people ride on Mexico City's metro system every day, including producer Claire Mullen, who visited a couple months ago. I'm in the metro on the pink line at Cuauhtemoc,

which has an eagle icon. Mexico City's metro is incredibly crowded and very extensive. And yet, it is often recognized as one of the easiest rail systems to navigate, partly because of its iconography. La Católica, which is a big ship. It looks like a pirate ship without the pirate symbol. And then we have Merced, where there are six apples in a crate.

And those icons are there, thanks in part to Lance Wyman. The Metro was supposed to make its debut during the Olympics, but excavators kept unearthing ancient architecture in the path of the tracks, and the opening was delayed. But Wyman was still involved in its design, specifically its map. He employed the same visual system he developed for the Olympics to help international visitors navigate the trains. In the Olympics, we relied on the graphics, and I thought, well, why can't a city do that?

So Wyman color-coded each line and created a unique icon for every single stop. So, even if you're visiting from Japan and can't read any Spanish at all, you can say to yourself, I want to take the pink line to the stop with the grasshopper on it. The station that stopped at Chapultepec Park, Chapultepec means grasshopper hill in the Nahuatl, the Aztec language, so I used a grasshopper. Again, some Mexicans took issue with this young foreigner coming in to design something that would be such a huge part of their city.

But eventually, Mexican designers took up the project and made it their own. You know, I designed the first three lines of the Metro and all the they have 12 lines now and they were designed by Mexican designers and some of these are better than I did in the original line. After the Olympics, after the metro, Wyman did some more work for Mexico like the design for the 1970 World Cup but he went back to the US. Wyman went on to design more maps, big ones, like for the National Zoo and the D.C. Metro system, although none of them used symbols and icons and colors as completely as in Mexico City.

The clear iconography of the Metro system is a reminder of a complicated and sometimes terrible period in Mexico City's history. It's a simple design that invites you to explore the massive and complex metropolis. It's a design that assures you that if you get lost, no matter where you're from or what language you speak, you can find your way around and see the city for yourself. After the break, an Olympic road not taken.

The Olympic Games seem almost timeless going back to ancient Greece, so it can be easy to forget that the modern games as we know them today were only launched just over a century ago. Last week we heard about firefighting and tug of war, which tug of war has to come back in the Olympics. I mean, I think this might be my new mission in life. But what about Olympic poetry? Kurt Kohlstedt told us about it back in 2021.

To get things started, Roman, I'm gonna have you read the first stanza of a poem. It's titled, Ode to Sport, and it was written in 1912, 16 years after the first modern Olympic Games. Okay, here we go. O Sport, pleasure of the gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the gray clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled, and the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountaintops

and flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests. Well done. That was excellent. So, other than them having a really dim view of the modern condition, what is that poem about? Well, see, it's not just any poem. It's an Olympic poem. And I don't mean that it's a poem about the Olympics. I mean it literally won an Olympic gold medal for literature.

Okay. Okay. I mean, I don't know about every sport in the Olympics, but I'm pretty sure literature is not one that I'm familiar with at all. Yeah, you're right. And nobody is today, for the most part. But for decades, the Olympic Games actually did include competitions that fell under these five main artistic categories and one of those was literature. And so because I only think of them as sporting events and decathlons and pentathlons, how did literature find its way into the Olympics?

Well, it started with this person who was broadly credited with launching the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin. And he was this French aristocrat who advocated for and then ultimately organized the International Olympic Committee, which is still around today. So he's at the forefront of Olympics in general, and that committee decided to host the very first modern International Olympics in 1896. And they chose Athens as the host city, which was, of course, a nod to the ancient Greek Olympics.

So the first modern games in Athens, they did both feature sports and arts like that? Well, not quite yet. The very first set of games was basically what you'd expect. It had sports like swimming and weightlifting and fencing. But then after we'd had a couple of good successful games, also turned around sports, Coubertin sprung this idea on the IOC in 1906.

He basically was like, here we go. Like, why don't we also add these arts categories I've been thinking about? And those were architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. Architecture, now we're cooking our gas here. — Right? — Okay, keep going.

— And so these architects and other artists participating in this new, quote, pantathlon of the muses, unquote, were supposed to be amateurs, much like their counterparts competing on the sports side. — It all seems like a pretty big departure from, you know, what I think of as the ancient Olympics. Were those always centered around sports too? I mean, they were for the most part, but there were some ancient Olympic competitions for music or singing or even what's called heralding, which I gather just involved announcing things

really loudly. I don't know. And so, Cooper Tend kind of referred to that in his arguments for including the arts in the modern Olympics. And he wrote, quote, in the high times of Olympia, the fine arts were combined harmoniously with the Olympic Games to create their glory. This is to become reality once again, End quote. But, and I find this part strange for some reason. All of these artistic entries were also supposed to be related to sports. Which, I mean, the poem you had me read at the top was like that. It was about sports.

I mean, I don't know if like, if you were judging all poems equally, if one about sports would necessarily win the gold medal, but when it comes to poems in the Olympics during this era, they had to be about sports, correct? Yeah, exactly. So it was kind of limiting. And so in the realm of architecture, for example, contenders submitted stuff like athletic stadiums and sporting complexes and playing fields and swimming pools and even ski jumps. And some of those pieces were published during the Olympics, like that's where they kind of first appeared, but others were actually built structures, like out in the world.

So they were judging actual built structures. It's not just, like, how did you bring your building to Athens? Like, how did that work? Right, so in most cases, whether or not the thing was built, they relied on renderings. But there were exceptions. So in the 1928 games in Amsterdam,

there was this Dutch architect who won the gold medal for the stadium that was being used in those Olympics. Talk about a home field advantage. Right, I mean, it does seem like it being there maybe could skew the judges a little bit. But the crazy thing is like by this time, there were a lot of submissions. Like that year alone, there were over a thousand works

of art submitted in all these different categories. Wow. It's kind of amazing to me that there was this period of time where there were that many submissions and it was that big a part of the games, but no one knows about this period of time in the Olympics history. Right? And for, like, I didn't either. I mean, you know, I went to architecture school.

You'd think that they would teach you about the architectural Olympics. But no, they kind of faded from memory. But for a long time, they were really a big deal. And the IOC even got to the point of adding new subcategories within the arts, like orchestra and dramatic works, even town planning. And so these creative competitions grew popular. And one side effect was that they started to naturally draw in people who were more like aspiring professionals and even veteran creatives.

And some of these participating artists were even selling their artworks during the games. Well, that seems to be somewhat in the violation of the spirit of the games, you know, just to use it as a showcase for selling your work. It's like a big gallery show. Right. If the act of being in the games turns you from an amateur to a professional, then that makes things kind of complicated. It does. And really this idea of amateurism was something that the IOC was pushing more

and more as time went on and we were getting into the 1940s. So the arts became this natural target, right? Like it was the obvious thing that was like not being quite as amateur as everybody thought it would be. And frankly, you know, this amateur focus to begin with was a bit of a stretch for the arts. And that architect who won the award for building that Olympic stadium, like obviously he wasn't an amateur.

Right. Yeah, you couldn't host the Olympic games in an amateur stadium, you know, like with amateur adherence to building guidelines, for example. Right, right. Just like a rough sketch of an idea, you know, it'll be fine. And there were other problems too. Like some artists didn't want to participate because they might lose and that could damage their reputation.

And then, you know, as you mentioned before, it's like this sports focus was pretty limiting. And so eventually after the London games in 48, the IOC just discontinued the arts competitions altogether. And now there's this thing called the Cultural Olympiad, which is separate, but really like the main events and the medals are for sports. I mean, that's stunning to me that it lasted until 1948. So that means that there's like a stretch of like 30 years or more where there were

these artistic medal winners. Like are there anybody that I would know of in that cohort? You know, most of them aren't famous people, for better or for worse. Like the ones I actually find most interesting are these like, like ways in which they kind of like pushed the idea of the Olympics or like things that like set unusual records. So for example, there was this Olympian in 1912, who won a medal for swimming while he also won a medal for sculpture. Like to me, that's really cool. Like that's like, wow, that's really the liberal arts of competition, right? You can like win art and sports.

And then there was this winner in the arts who was 73 years old when he won. You know, we think of Olympic contenders being pretty young, but it's like in the arts really any age can apply. And then there's Coubertin himself, who won a gold medal in an arts category in the 1912 Paris Olympics. Pete Slauson Wait a second. I mean, he helped jumpstart the Olympics, like sort of the founder of the modern Olympics, and then he competed in the Olympics. Jared Slauson Yes! Yes, he did. And he won his award for

literature. Or more specifically, poetry. Pete Slauson Did he write that poem at the top that you made me read? That's the one. Coubertin submitted it under a pseudonym, and he won the gold! Well, I'm sure there's nothing fishy going on there. No, not at all. I mean, there is this possibility that he submitted it because he wanted to make sure all the art categories were represented, you know, the first year that the arts were included.

But obviously, I mean, I can't help but wonder if he was secretly harboring a second motive. I mean, he put a lot into pitching these arts competitions. So, you know, maybe just maybe he knew he really couldn't compete on the sports side, but you know, he wanted to shout out the gold. If there was a podcast Olympics and I could get a gold medal, I would totally be into it. Right? You could found it and then submit your work to it. It'd be the best. Love it. Oh, I really do love it. Well, that's so great. I want to bring this back. I would love to see, you know, what, you know, Michael Phelps could do when it comes to designing a stadium. I mean, that would be so awesome.

Or how well he can sculpt. I mean, I don't know. Like, the possibilities are endless. Well, I love imagining an Olympics like that. Thanks, Kurt. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Claire Mullen, Avery Truffleman, and Kurt Kohlstedt. Music by Swan Real, technical production by Shreve Yousef, remixed by Martin Gonzalez. Thanks to the team at Radio Diaries who provided us with some tape from their documentary,

A Movement, A Massacre, and Mexico's 50-year search for the truth, produced by Anayatse Diaz-Cortez. It tells the story of the student protest of 1968 and uncovers a secret behind the government's bloody crackdown. If you haven't listened to Radio Diaries before, they are probably the best audio documentarians in the business of all time, so do yourself a huge favor and go listen. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Nikita Apte is our intern.

The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Basha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Nina Potuck, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California, birthplace of Kamala Harris. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server.

There are over 4,500 people there talking about the Power Broker, talking about architecture, talking about all kinds of things, podcasts that they recommend. It's just a great place to be. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.