Poetry's Relationship With the Olympics Sports fans are not necessarily renowned for their literary tastes - their passions oft running less to soulful ruminations than to beer-fueled stadium chants - so Olympics observers may be flummoxed by the sudden proliferation of poetry related to the 2012 Games. This weekend, international poets have converged on London to orate in 50 languages at a festival called Poetry Parnassus, with 100,000 copies of their collected work to be dropped by helicopter on the venue by the Thames. Another poetic project, "The Written World," will feature a poem from each of the 204 competing Olympic countries read live and broadcast daily by the BBC. And verse has been engraved on plaques of stone, metal and wood emblazoned at strategic points throughout the Olympic Park, for the edification of athlete and spectator alike. Yet the relationship between poetry and the Olympics goes back to the very origins of the Games. In ancient Greece, literary events were an indispensable part of athletic festivals, where fully clothed writers could be as popular with the crowd as the buff athletes who strutted about in the nude, gleaming with olive oil. Spectators packing the sanctuary of Zeus sought perfection in both body and mind. Champion athletes commissioned great poets like Pindar to compose their victory odes, which were sung at lavish banquets by choruses of boys. The refined cultural ambience could put contemporary opening ceremonies, with their parade of pop stars, to shame. Philosophers and historians introduced cutting-edge work, while lesser-known poets set up stalls or orated from soapboxes. Criticism could be meted out brutally: when the Sicilian dictator Dionysius presented subpar poems in 384 B.C., disgusted sports fans beat him up and trashed his tent. At other Greek athletic festivals, like those at Delphi, dedicated to Apollo, the god of poetry and music, verse recital was featured as a competitive event, along with contests for the lyre and choral dancing. For much of the 20th century, poetry was an official, medal-winning competition in the Games. The French visionary who revived the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, always insisted Greek-style arts contests should be allowed alongside athletics. His dream was realized in 1912 at Stockholm, where literature, together with music, painting, sculpture and even architecture, became Olympic events in the so-called Pentathlon of the Muses, in which all submissions had to be "directly inspired by the idea of sport." In seven Olympiads, writers - almost always poets - were awarded gold, silver and bronze medals alongside sprinters, weight lifters and wrestlers. The general literature category was then expanded in 1928, 1936 and 1948 to include specific contests for epic and lyric poetry. De Coubertin himself was no slouch: he took the very first gold medal in 1912 for his "Ode to Sport," which he entered under twin pseudonyms, one French, one German. It reads, unsurprisingly, like a florid evocation of the classical ideal: "O Sport, you are Beauty! . . . O Sport, you are Justice! . . . O Sport, you are Happiness! The body trembles in bliss upon hearing your call. . . .  But the inclusion of Olympic verse quickly proved contentious, provoking an outcry from highly competitive intellectuals. In 1912, Swedish art academies objected to the sports-only theme, declaring that the contests "totally lacked a meaningful purpose," according to the historian Richard Stanton in "The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions." And the rule that contestants must be amateurs was absurd when applied to the arts, critics argued, since only serious practitioners were worth including. Indeed, the most famous authors of the era refrained from the Pentathlon of the Muses, lending a homespun, sideshow quality to the contests. How could it not when the gold for literature in the 1924 Paris Olympics, for example, went not to T. S. Eliot or Jean Cocteau but to one Géo-Charles, nom de plume of Charles Louis Prosper Guyot, for "Jeux Olympiques," an evocation of the hammer-throwing and foot races? "The runners bend, tense flowers, . . . / A shot: A violent word! / And suddenly / Necks extended, forward / like stalks / faces like pale snatched / apples, / teeth and jaws rushing into / space." Today, the author is little known outside his hometown, Grenoble, where a small museum hails him as "a pioneer in athletic art." The only marquee poet to try his hand was the Italian proto-fascist Gabriele d'Annunzio, who entered in 1912, only to have his work snubbed - although the playwright Thornton Wilder did sit as a judge in the 1932 Los Angeles Games, selecting a German ode to mountaineering. Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine and the author of "The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games."