As a confirmed critic of modern tattoos, who sounded off in these very pages about the ugly plague of body tats infesting our streets, I might be expected to disapprove of the latest manifestation of the fashion – the habit of many athletes taking part in the Paris Olympics to adorn themselves with the distinctive five interlocking rings of the Games’ logo: what I’m calling the ‘champ stamp’.
In fact, the athletes have such beautiful bodies – young, toned and fit – and the rings themselves have such a pleasing symmetry that I can only approve and applaud the discreet addition of the logo to their rippling musculatures. As they spring into action on the racing track or diving board, these athletes do not remotely resemble the ambling lumps of Stilton cheese who mostly sport contemporary tattooing.
The logo on the Olympians is more akin to the war wounds of the Agincourt veterans lauded by the King in Shakespeare’s Henry V, who strip their sleeves to show their scars in their dotage as a way of saying ‘We were there upon St Crispin’s Day’. They, like the medals they win, are a proud badge of honour to show future grandchildren.
The logo, like the modern Games themselves, is the brainchild of France’s Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the Ancient Greek Olympics in the 1890s to encourage fitness and sportsmanship and (as an unspoken by-product), to prepare and toughen up his fellow Frenchmen for the coming war with Germany that he knew was coming. In 1913, on the eve of that war, the Baron first sketched out the rings of the logo in a letter, explaining that their five colours represented the five continents that had already joined his Olympics movement.
In fact, de Coubertin drew much of the inspiration for his Olympics ideal from Britain’s public schools, which had made an almost religious cult of games and sporting prowess. His major hero was Thomas Arnold, head of Rugby School, as portrayed in the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who exemplified the amateur spirit he admired. It was taking part in games, rather than actually winning them, that counted. Such a spirit was also expressed in another British literary work, Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitae Lampada’, with its repeated refrain to ‘play up, play up and play the game’.
Historians are divided on whether the Ancient Greek Olympians were really gentlemanly amateurs as Coubertin liked to believe, or (like their contemporary counterparts in Paris) were actually determined sweaty professionals bent on winning at all costs. Along with their medals, the athletes who have marked themselves with their Olympic champ stamps will be taking home, a lasting badge of pride and honour that the old Baron himself may well have approved.
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