Serene
Active member
Roald Bradstock can remember the exact moment when he began to feel unwell.
The former Olympic javelin thrower’s resting heart rate suddenly surged to a frightening 200 beats per minute last year, triggering an unusual first instinct: His first thought wasn’t about trying to save his own life, it was instead to preserve his own legacy. He immediately rushed downstairs and began signing his name on his artwork – just in case.
A short time later he was lying prone on his living room floor as paramedics worked to stabilize him. He’d suffered a mini-stroke, and he almost went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance.
Fortunately, he survived to tell the tale – and create more of the artwork he so quickly thought of in the heat of the moment.
Dubbed the “Olympic Picasso” by the British Hammer thrower and commentator Paul Dickenson almost 20 years ago, Bradstock – who competed in the 1984 Los Angeles games and in Seoul four years later – spent many years fighting for recognition and acceptance. He recently seems to have finally found it.
In June, his work, “A Race Against Time” was featured alongside art world legends like Rembrandt, Rodin, Andy Warhol and Banksy in a weighty French tome called “Le Sport dans L ’Art” (Sport in Art). A month earlier, he and five other Olympic and Paralympic athlete artists had been profiled in the French magazine Beaux, a feature that referenced his work spearheading the revival of the Olympic artist movement.
From 1912 until 1948, Olympic competitions featured art competitions in architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture, and the modern Olympic Movement’s founder – the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin – awarded medals for creations inspired by sport. Since 2018, Bradstock has been helping the IOC reignite the movement with an Artists in Residency program; he’s the only athlete to have been involved in three games as an artist.
The former Olympic javelin thrower’s resting heart rate suddenly surged to a frightening 200 beats per minute last year, triggering an unusual first instinct: His first thought wasn’t about trying to save his own life, it was instead to preserve his own legacy. He immediately rushed downstairs and began signing his name on his artwork – just in case.
A short time later he was lying prone on his living room floor as paramedics worked to stabilize him. He’d suffered a mini-stroke, and he almost went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance.
Fortunately, he survived to tell the tale – and create more of the artwork he so quickly thought of in the heat of the moment.
Dubbed the “Olympic Picasso” by the British Hammer thrower and commentator Paul Dickenson almost 20 years ago, Bradstock – who competed in the 1984 Los Angeles games and in Seoul four years later – spent many years fighting for recognition and acceptance. He recently seems to have finally found it.
In June, his work, “A Race Against Time” was featured alongside art world legends like Rembrandt, Rodin, Andy Warhol and Banksy in a weighty French tome called “Le Sport dans L ’Art” (Sport in Art). A month earlier, he and five other Olympic and Paralympic athlete artists had been profiled in the French magazine Beaux, a feature that referenced his work spearheading the revival of the Olympic artist movement.
From 1912 until 1948, Olympic competitions featured art competitions in architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture, and the modern Olympic Movement’s founder – the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin – awarded medals for creations inspired by sport. Since 2018, Bradstock has been helping the IOC reignite the movement with an Artists in Residency program; he’s the only athlete to have been involved in three games as an artist.
