Vintage Athletes - Part 29

 Discus

Throwing the discus was one of the original ancient Greek Olympic events.  This famous statue is a second century Roman copy of a Greek statue by Myron, c. 450 BC, known as the discobolus, or discus thrower.

As we've seen in a previous post, in the opening of the movie Olympia Part 1, a documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Nazi propagandist Leni Reifenstahl, the discobolus statue morphs into a naked German athlete, Erwin Huber, winding up to throw the discus.  Huber competed in the decathlon, which includes throwing the discus.

Another ancient depiction of a discus thrower is this Roman athlete in a fresco painting found in Stabiae, another town that was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.

(Disclosure: the fresco surface was damaged, so I darkened the background, which was originally dark but had light gray blotches, to make it less obtrusive.)

Many copies of the discobolus statue were made, and other statues were inspired by it.  This is a discobolus made by Matthaus Kessels in 1828, now in Chatsworth House, England.

This statue, called Finnish Discus Thrower, was made by Konstantin Dimitriadis for the 1924 Olympics in Paris.  Later, it was moved in front of the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, which had been the site of the first modern Olympic games in 1896.

This is a French postcard of Hollywood actor George O'Brien posing as the discobolus with a fig leaf, c. 1925.

It should not be surprising that German photographers in the 1930s would capture images of athletes without fig leaves.  Because of the influence of the FKK (free body culture) naturist movement in Germany, Germans were less hung up about nudity than most other countries.  This is Discus Thrower by Kurt Reichert, c. 1935.

But I was surprised to find a lot of photos of naked discus throwers by Australian photographers of the same period.  This is Discus Thrower III by Max Dupain, undated but probably around 1937.  He took several such photos, adding his own Aussie twist by setting them on the beach.

This is Karl with Discus, c. 1938, by New-Zealand-born Australian photographer Keast Burke.

Man (discus thrower), 1940, by Australian photographer Laurence LeGuay is also set on the beach.

The British Empire Games, held in Sydney in 1938, used a naked discus thrower photo on their poster.  One source said "Photograph possibly by Max Dupain (Australia 1911-92) as his photographs frequently feature in photographic publicity around this period."

We'll end today with English model and actor Hugh Plummer throwing what looks more like a 45 rpm record (remember those?) than a discus.  It's not a vintage photo.  But I'm guessing you're not going to complain.