Sports Mythology and the British Museum

Call it lame or boring, but the copy of Discobolus in British Museum is the greatest example of sports mythology in the entire museum. I walked through the entire museum and saw Cleopatra, the gold medals and the Rosetta Stone. However, there is not a better example of mythology in sports in that museum than Discobolus. Please note that my emphasis on this piece isn’t that of excitement, but contextual importance. After being in Florence, Italy for five days and seeing Michelangelo’s original David and many other remarkable pieces of work, a replica of a statue just doesn’t cut it for me.

            Once upon a time, the Greeks avidly celebrated and worshiped the “beauty and perfection of man”. To further celebrate this, the Greek males performed the Olympic games in the nude. Every single piece of art from that period of time depicts males in the nude in a way that glorifies the body, hence the concept “beauty and perfection of man”.  Most famous sculptures are in this very style. The Olympics were part of a vehicle that carried this concept further, and eventually it has evolved into the spectacle that it is today. Anything to do with the Olympics in the museum is in some way, shape or form a descendent of this iconic sculpture.

            Seeing the Olympic gold medals was another highlight of the museum though. To imagine being an Olympian is great enough but to actually earn a gold medal is something almost impossible to fathom. The interesting thing the chariots is that many people feel that horse racing isn’t a “sport” yet chariot racing was once an Olympic sport.

            Non-sports related but the highlight of the museum for me was the mummy of Cleopatra. In the past few weeks, I’ve been toe-to-toe with the graves of Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Sir Isaac Newton, among many others, but there is nothing quite like standing in front of Cleopatra. I’m an archaeology nerd so I’ve always found Egyptian artifacts and mummies to be very intriguing and mysterious. Seeing the Rosetta Stone was also pretty awesome. I got to see the Code of Hammurabi at the Louvre in Paris, so I knew pretty much what to expect, but it was still pretty awesome to see.