VANCOUVER -- Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron without whose vision we would not be here doing this, singlehandedly revived the Games over a century ago. But to turn the Olympics into a worldwide Movement, he had to compromise some of his goals and dreams. This is a familiar dynamic to anybody who has ever tried to advance a big individual idea through a committee.

De Coubertin did not like the idea of a separate Winter Olympics, but it didn't matter. By the 1920's, the IOC had become a collective groupthink monster well out of control of its founder, and wealthy Italians and Belgians got the concept through to completion. His power and his health were fading; just 12 years before the proto-Winter Games of Chamonix 1924, he was still able to threaten a one-man boycott and get his way. In 1912, that's what he did, leading to the first Olympic art competitions.

The Father of the Modern Games believed that the Olympics should award medals for art as well as sport; he maintained that these are equal pursuits. From Stockholm 1912 to London 1948, organizers held contests in painting, sculpture, music and poetry at the Summer Olympics. (Their hidden history was covered in this space two years ago.) De Coubertin died in 1937, and there was nobody to champion the cause. After 40 years of dormancy, the arts returned to the Games in 1992, when Barcelona organizers put together a mammoth, ongoing culture festival in conjunction with the athletic competitions. At every Olympics since then, winter and summer, there's been an official Cultural Olympiad.

WHISTLER, B.C. -- Without question, the history of mascots deserves its own field of study, its own -ology. The 86-year-old winter edition may be the Olympics' strange and cold stepchild, but it has been responsible for a couple of major breakthroughs in Games symbolism: initially, the first mascot -- Schuss, the cartoon skier from Grenoble 1968. Twenty years later and one Canadian province east from where we are now, Calgary offered Hidy and Howdy the polar bears -- the first multiple-mascot setup in Olympic history.

One (and just one) of the horrible legacies of Whatizit is that Atlanta 1996 was the last time that an Olympics featured a single mascot. Since then, this hasn't been a job for just one character. Different aspects of the festival are captured in different forms. For instance, Neve and Gliz from Torino 2006 represented snow and ice, respectively. You've got to have both!

Over the last six festivals, Winter and Summer, there have been an average of three mascots per Games. This, of course, means an average of three separate purchases, a number that's an easy metaphor for the greed and commercial overreach inherent in the 21st Century Olympics.

At Vancouver 2010, there are three mascots, so we're par. Each is a mythical and outlandish creature (all created by the wonderful Meomi Design). There's Quatchi, the young and shy sasquatch who wants to be an Olympic hockey goalie someday. Miga, the female one, is a magical whale-bear who lost her ability to transform from one to the other one day, and since then she's been stuck in the middle and on land. Sumi is arguably the most dynamic mascot in Olympic history: he is an animal spirit who is part whale, part thunderbird, part bear and all-purpose.

In 1980, 12 fewer nations showed up in Moscow than had appeared in Montreal four years earlier. The absence of many Western countries -- including the United States, which had earned 94 medals in 1976 -- ensured that the Olympics would not be a true test among the best athletes in the world. There were unintended effects to the boycott spearheaded by U.S. Jimmy Carter as well: it broke a sensitive bear's heart in two.

On September 25, 1974, a beaver was born. This wasn't just any beaver, it was the official mascot of the upcoming Montreal Olympic Games, announced and introduced to the world. Its name, Amik, was chosen via a public contest. Nobody ever figured out if Amik was male or female... but then again, nobody really asked the question.

A Canadian national symbol chosen for its industriousness and patience, the minimalist mascot was a product of Montreal's overall design concept, which was created by the Graphics and Design Directorate, a committee made up of prominent Canadian graphic artists of the time. The designers credited with the mascot's birth were Yvon Laroche, Pierre-Yves Pelletier, Guy St-Arnaud and George Huel.

One of my favorite Olympic items is my small plastic Waldi, a souvenir of the 1972 Munich Games. Waldi was the first Olympic mascot, and the first in an occasional 10-part series as we count down the animals, spirits and whatizits that have made the Games more fun. Then it'll be time for Beijing... where you'll see plenty of these folks.

Waldi was created by legendary German designer Otl Aicher (responsible for the Lufthansa logo, among others), whose work with the Munich 1972 organizing committee forged a new relationship between art and sport. The series of posters he created were instant classics, and the subject of an exhibition in London last year. Aicher did not live to see his work properly respected, unfortunately; he died at 69 years old in 1991, the victim of a lawnmower accident.

The Sulky Driver by Farpi Vignoli (ITA), gold medal in sculpture, Berlin 1936

To viewers at home, the Olympics are presented as an awkward sandwich indeed. There are 16 days of world-class competition between two ornate ceremonies, opening and closing, both of which overflow with extravagant, obscure and potentially superfluous imagery. In other words, art. In the Games' present televised form, it occasionally proves difficult to fathom the importance of native costumes, light shows, and sequined dancers in the Olympic context -- at least as anything other than expensive and frivolous entertainment.

There was a time, however, when art had a much more prominent and defined role every Olympiad. The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, desired for the quadrennial event to be not only the world's preeminent sporting spectacle, but an important cultural one as well. Once the Olympic Movement had survived its rocky first decade (taking a back seat to World's Fairs in Paris and Saint Louis), Coubertin attempted to build on the Games' foundation and incorporate the arts. As he would write in a 1910 essay, "The first necessity was to revive them, and the second to shape them."

That shape manifested itself in Olympic art competitions. Coubertin's dream was to organize painting, sculpture and architecture events, the winners of which would receive the same gold medals as those given out for swimming, running and jumping. Competitors would be judged on their ability to capture the pure sporting ideal in their work. But unfortunately for the founder, the London 1908 organizing committee was nowhere near as amenable to this idea as he was.