Sports and art meet on the Olympic stage

Mark Dyer
Contributor
Priscila Uppal participated in every event – from speed skating to sledge hockey – over the course of the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.
She did it all wearing only one uniform: a Team Canada hockey jersey with ‘POET’ stitched on the back.
The York professor and writer attended the Games as the first poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now, a not-for-profit organization devoted to raising funds and awareness for Canadian athletes. Her mission was to capture the experience of the Winter Olympics through poetry.
Uppal wrote poems about every sport category and published two per day during the Games, making her perhaps the busiest member of Team Canada. These poems have been collected in her new book, Winter Sport: Poems, launched Oct. 19.
Uppal said she took the position of poet-in-residence to celebrate athletes, but also to address the divide between sport and art. According to her, athletes are a lot like artists: both groups of people are dedicated, disciplined and work creatively within their limitations. Sport, however, is often not seen as serious subject matter for art or poetry.
“If I say, ‘I want to read you my sport poem,’ you’re probably going to think it’s going to be ‘How We Won the Baseball Game’ or some ode to Sidney Crosby,” Uppal said.
Winter Sport challenges the notion that sport art can only be viewed in such a limited way.
Uppal uses the sports of the Winter Olympics to discuss a myriad of themes, love being a major one. This is not just the love of the game; it includes the love of teammates, siblings, parents, nature and romantic love. In “If My Lover Were a Snowboarder,” Uppal playfully re-appropriates snowboard tricks as sexual innuendo. Meanwhile, “Bobsleigh Love Poem” uses the two-man bobsleigh as metaphor for love.
“Like so many other topics that people write poetry about, there are thousands of ways to approach [sport],” Uppal said.
Why are art and sport thought of as so far removed? Uppal feels that, in our society, there is pressure to identify oneself as either athletic or artistic. This pressure may come from the way we first experience sport and art in school. A bad English teacher is the equivalent of being picked last for softball: they can both make you feel like something, whether it’s poetry or art, is beyond you.
In the spirit of the Olympics, Winter Sport is designed to repair the relationship between sport and art by introducing people to experiences that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to.
Uppal said people have greatly enjoyed her work at poetry readings, despite many admitting they never read at all, let alone poetry. For many, Winter Sport is about something familiar that allows them to open themselves up to poetry.
The poems can expose non-athletes to the world of sports as well. While you may not have had the best experience playing hockey, Uppal’s “Ode To Sliding Sports” could inspire you to take up luge.
Uppal breaks down the idea we can only be one or the other, demonstrating that sport and art are not mutually exclusive. In fact, being artistic can benefit your athletics and vice versa.
“It’s interesting to me that when athletes have another pursuit, it’s usually artistic,” Uppal said.
She cited Canadian Olympic rower and photographer, Kevin Light, as an example. Light is both a member of the rowing team and its official photographer, and Uppal recounted how much Light has learned about rowing simply through photographing it. Many athletes who have participated in Uppal’s sport writing workshops also claim to have gained a better understanding of their sport by approaching it in a different way.
Uppal herself has participated in sport since childhood and continues to as an adult. Over the last decade, she has taken lessons in fencing, figure skating, springboard diving, swimming mechanics and running.
Viewing sport as a “sister art” to her work as a writer, Uppal embodies the spirit of collaboration between athletics and art that comes through so clearly in her poetry.
Uppal is currently training to continue as Canadian Athletes Now’s poet-in-residence for the 2012 Summer Olympic in London, and plans to release Summer Sport: Poems some time after the event.