On the same day the Olympic Games are officially starting in London, and in the spirit of Douce’s wonderfully mad notebooks of Coincidences (Bodleian), the first image that came to my attention when opening the folder of prints to catalogue earlier this morning was this obvious antecedent of contemporary athletics:
Thomas Rowlandson, Rural sports. Smock racing, hand-coloured etching, 1811 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
The prize was not a gold medal, but ‘a linen smock decorated with ribbons’ (see Costa and Guthrie, eds., Women and Sport, 1994, p. 33). A related drawing and other plates from the same series of ‘Rural Sports’ by Thomas Rowlandson can be found in the British Museum:
Thomas Rowlandson, Smock race at a country fair, pen and brown ink with watercolour (The British Museum, London)