Whenever a Russian athlete wins gold you will hear a golden oldie

The first time that “Olympiakos Ymnos,” or the Olympic hymn, was played in front of a large audience, in Athens in 1896, the Greek composer Spyridon Samaras conducted a massive orchestra and a large choir in a performance of the song he had written.

“When the trumpet gave the signal and Samaras, a chubby fellow, lifted his baton,” another Greek composer recalled, “the Olympic hymn with those grandiose chords vibrated the national string in the souls of the myriad spectators who have filled the stadium and with national pride clapped maniacally the resurgence of the ancient Olympic Games.”

The song has not stirred such passion since. And it probably will not do so when it is used as an audible stand-in for the Russian national anthem at the Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea. It might just stir confusion.

The Russians, caught in a doping scandal, were stripped of key identifying markers at these Winter Games, such as their national uniforms and their flag. And their anthem.

So when a Russian athlete wins a gold medal — that will probably happen for the first time at the Pyeongchang Games in women’s figure skating — the Olympic flag of five interlocking rings will be raised to the rafters to the mostly unfamiliar strains of Samaras’s Olympic hymn.

“It’s not a bad piece of music,” said William Guegold, a retired music professor from the University of Akron and the author of 100 Years of Olympic Music published in 1996. “It’s just not something that has wide public appeal to it or would be a popular piece in any way.”

A faithful few might recognise it as the official anthem, or hymn, of the Olympics. It is traditionally played at the opening and closing ceremonies, and is somewhat forgettable.

The women’s figure skating final is Friday here; Thursday night on the East Coast. The Russian skaters Alina Zagitova, 15, and Evgenia Medvedeva, 18, are the consensus choices to win gold and silver. Whenever the Olympic hymn is played, for one of them or any other athlete from Russia, it will not be the first time that the song was used in place of a national anthem.

In 1992, for example, gold medal winners from the Unified Team, consisting of athletes from the recently fractured Soviet Union, were feted with the Olympic hymn. They watched as the Olympic flag was raised to the rafters to the sound of a little-known Greek composer’s song, sapping the usual emotion from the 

proceedings.

That, apparently, is the point of banning the Russian anthem — to take away a bit of the national pride in the accomplishment of winning a gold medal.
 

The unintended consequence: more Samaras.

Born in 1861, Samaras was Greece’s most famous composer when the ancient idea of the Olympics was rebooted in Athens in 1896. He had moved to Paris, then to Italy, where he built a reputation for operas in the style of a contemporary, Giacomo Puccini.

Samaras accepted an offer to write a hymn for the Olympics, certainly unaware it would be the most lasting part of his legacy. (One measure? Spotify’s library includes one song from Samaras: “Olympic Hymn”.)

“These were the reconstituted Games by Pierre de Coubertin, designed to be competitions of the body, mind and spirit — this uplifting, Greek, heroic ideal,” Guegold said. “So they wanted a piece that exhibited that.”

What the Olympics got was a romantic, accessible piece, with lots of brass and drums, and a softer middle section wrapped around a poem written by Kostis Palamas, another Greek, and dripping in schmaltzy grandeur.

The style set the tone for future Olympic songs, including “Bugler’s Dream”, by Leo Arnaud, known widely to American television audiences, and John Williams’s “Olympic Fanfare and Theme”, from the 1984 Los Angeles Games. (Those two, sometimes clumsily stitched together, are still used on NBC’s Olympic telecasts.)

“The beginning is very much a fanfare,” Guegold said. “The trumpets blowing the call, getting everybody to come together. It has that sort of rhythmic quality, musical triplets and fanfare devices.”

The middle section of praises is sung by choirs, including the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics, often with Palamas’s words translated into the local language. In 1988, at the Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea, they were sung in Korean.

“Then the end has a nice big splash again,” Guegold said. “It grows, gets louder, and has a strong finish to it in terms of its grandeur.”

© 2018 The New York Times