1896: Athens, Greece
There was no official poster for the first Olympics, but the cover page of the official report is often used to refer to the Games. French historian Baron Pierre de Coubertin was moved to found the International Olympic Committee after attending a sports day in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Aiming to foster “international understanding through sport”, the games were the biggest sporting event to that date. Marathon running was added as a link to the ancient games. Thousands rose to their feet in the stadium as Greek runner Spyridon Louis entered triumphant at the end of the first marathon of modern times.
1900: Paris, France
Several posters were created for the 1900 games, depicting athletics, rowing, cycling, fencing and gymnastics. The posters included a female fencer holding a foil, sword and sabre, but women didn't compete in fencing competitions until 1924.
1904: St Louis, USA
The image above is the reproduction of the cover of the programme of the Games. It shows a view of the host city, enhanced by the use of a "fish's eye" effect.
1908: London, UK
The poster for the first London Games refers to the White City Stadium, which was built for the 1908 Olympics. The stadium was demolished in 1985 and replaced by the BBC White City Centre.
1912: Stockholm, Sweden
Far from being recent, the notion of the Olympics as a PR opportunity for the host nation dates back to 1912, when Stockholm provided the first purpose-built stadium, the first concerted Olympic advertising campaign and the first official poster, all with the aim of promoting Sweden as a dynamic modern nation.
At first sight Olle Hjortsberg’s design, which sets dynamic male nudity against vigorous art nouveau pattern-making, seems to belong to a culture of naive, essentially platonic homoeroticism that flourished in the early 20th century and vanished with the First World War. Yet even then the image wasn’t perceived as entirely innocent. Those whirling orange streamers were added to shield the central figure’s modesty, and the poster was barred from many public places.
1920: Antwerp, Belgium
This poster represents the flags of the participating nations, with the coat of arms of Antwerp, and a discobolus, a reference to the Ancient Games.
1924: Paris, France
Jean Droit’s poster turns the French team into a camp, fascist-saluting chorus-line. Pressing nationalist buttons at an international event, this is a delightful example of the Olympic poster’s capacity to get it completely wrong.
1928: Amsterdam, Holland
1932: Los Angeles, USA
A poster representing the ancient Greek custom of sending a young athlete out to announce the celebration of the next Olympiad.
1936: Berlin, Germany
Wagnerian Götterdämmerung meets robot-age pseudoclassicism in this poster for the most controversial of all Olympics, staged by Hitler as a showcase for German sporting and technical mastery – though in the event it didn’t work out quite the way he hoped.
While Germany had won the Olympic bid before Hitler came to power, the Nazi administration backed them with the most ruthlessly efficient publicity campaign seen at any games to date, with 44 offices in 40 countries.
The vast, purpose-built Olympiastadion with quasi-classical façade by Albert Speer evoked imperial Roman grandeur in the setting for an event that was as much apocalyptic political rally as it was sporting occasion.
Hero of the games for most of the rest of the world was the African-American athlete Jesse Owens, who won gold in the 100 and 200 metres, the long jump and the relay – publicly trouncing Nazi notions of Aryan racial superiority.
Leni Riefenstahl’s ground-breaking film Olympia captured the event in a mythic essay in quasi-classical body culture and revolutionary camera moves that still astonishes – and unnerves.
1940: Helsinki, Finland
The Games were cancelled due to the outbreak of World War II. Helsinki eventually held the 1952 Summer Olympics.
1948: London, UK
With athletes billeted in barracks, their rations supplemented by voluntary food donations, these became known as the Austerity Games.
While Walter Herz’s design has a certain charm, its rather clunky drawing feels marooned in the pre-war era – as though there wasn’t the intellectual energy, let alone the financial resources, to create anything new. The bright optimistic aesthetics of the Festival of Britain, only three years later, had yet to manifest themselves.
The opening ceremony at Wembley Stadium “profoundly moved not only all who saw it,” according to an official report, “but also the millions listening in on the radio throughout the world.” The world and the games had come through.
1952: Helsinki, Finland
These Games used the poster created by Ilmari Sysimetsä for the 1940 Games, with the dates changed.
1956: Melbourne, Australia
This poster design - a folded invitation card featuring the Olympic rings and the Coat of Arms of the City of Melbourne - deserved a gold medal for dullness.
1960: Rome, Italy
1960 took the games back to the classical world, set against a backdrop of Cold War high anxiety.
Many events were held in Mussolini’s bombastic Marble Stadium, and the games’ posters seemed barely to have moved on from the Fascist era. The poster for the preliminary Olympic Days of 1959 was implicitly authoritarian in feel and style. If the final poster was a shade more innocuous, the troubling connotations of imperial Roman imagery – the Capitoline wolf suckling Romulus and Remus – couldn’t quite be shaken off.
Pier Luigi Nervi’s futuristic Palazetto dello Sport provided an aesthetic more appropriate to the time in which the 18-year-old Cassius Clay won his first light-heavyweight title. Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila became the first African Olympic hero, running the marathon barefoot along the ancient Appian Way.
1964: Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo was the first truly modern Olympics – at last Olympic imagery had caught up with the cutting edge of modern aesthetics; stunning posters combined startling Modernism with a typically elliptical Japanese vision.
The games themselves were captured with a similarly stark and poetic feel in Kon Ichikawa’s extraordinary Tokyo Olympiad – which reaches an unforgettable climax as Abebe Bikila wins the marathon a second time, in sponsored Nike trainers. The Olympic flame was lit by 19-year-old Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima the day the bomb dropped, while the easy listening of Helmut Zacharias’s Tokyo Melody jostled the Beatles in hit parades around the world. The Sixties were nearing their high watermark.
1968: Mexico City, Mexico
A year on from the Summer of Love, this poster was suitably psychedelic. The black and white poster recalled the traditional patterns of the Huichole Indians.
1972: Munich, Germany
Designated the “Happy Olympics”, the 1972 Munich games were anything but. Conceived to promote a positive and peaceful image of modern Germany, these were the games when the utopian Olympic ideal came most badly unstuck.
They also provoked the richest flowering of poster art, as design director Otl Aicher commissioned posters from 35 leading artists. Among the Brits were David Hockney and Richard Smith. The result was a dazzling array of experimental imagery.
Yet these games were overshadowed by the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by members of the Palestinian Black September group. The games continued with flags at half-mast, with American swimmer Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals. But it took the Olympic ideal a good decade to recover.
1976: Montreal, Canada
A poster that doesn't deserve a medal. Baron Pierre de Courbertin’s Olympic rings get the shakes in a wrong-headed attempt to jazz up one of the most recognisable logos in the world.
1980: Moscow, Soviet Union
This design featured a section of a running track creating an architectural silhouette typical of Moscow, topped with a five-pointed red star.
1984: Los Angeles, USA
With 1972 beset by terrorist violence, 1976 in Montreal by financial disorganisation and 1980 in Moscow widely boycotted in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, only LA bid for 1984, setting the scene for a celebration of Eighties commercialism. With $225 million raised from the sale of exclusive TV rights to ABC, this was the most financially successful games of modern times. A series of artist posters were commissioned and American big names dominated: Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and that honorary Californian David Hockney. Rauschenberg’s design filled the games’ star-in-motion logo with a selection of sliced-up photographs, turning the emblem into a flickering ziggurat of half-comprehensible images, a solution at once avant-garde and ineluctably American.
1988: Seoul, South Korea
The official poster represented the Games ideal of "Harmony and Progress" with a background design rendered with computer graphic techniques.
1992: Barcelona, Spain
1996: Atlanta, USA
In spite of controversy at the dominant role of local commercial giant Coca-Cola and a terrorist bomb attack close to the stadium, the so-called Centennial Olympics went ahead in avowed celebration of American racial and cultural diversity, with Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic flame. By now the Paralympics, initiated by British war veterans in 1948, were an established part of the games, with their own poster tradition. Yet the official poster for the games by Primo Angeli was a disappointingly bland, corporate throwback to generic classical ideas.
2000, Sydney, Australia
An athlete made of boomerangs holds an Olympic flame resembling the roof of Sydney Opera House in a car-crash of Aussie clichés.
2004: Athens, Greece
The poster for the Athens Games included an olive wreath, a reference to the ancient Games, where Olympic champions were crowned with a wreath.
2008, Beijing, China
The Beijing 2008 emblem combined a Chinese seal, the art of calligraphy and sporting features. The figure resembles the Chinese character "Jing", which stands for the name of the host city.
