Classical Music for Olympic Sports

The mind’s ear can be a funny place. Once you know a lot of classical music, snippets from yesteryear worm their way into everything — even the Summer Olympics. And as you watch all those sports that dance and zip across our fields of vision every four years, don’t be surprised if the soundtrack in your head reflects some of your memories from symphony halls, opera houses, or chamber music recitals.  

What music has the power to connect our brains with feats of athletic wonder? There are no right or wrong answers, but some matchups seem too perfect to ignore.   

Track and Field  

There are so many individual events in the Track and Field category that it’s now called “athletics.” So it’s impossible to capture the entire discipline in one piece of music. But here are two to think about. 

Michael Torke’s Javelin was commissioned for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary in 1994, and then played in the opening ceremony of the 1996 games there. Torke wrote that the piece ended up a collection of “short flashes and sweeps that reminded me of something in flight: a light spear thrown, perhaps, but not in the sense of a weapon, more in the spirit of a competition.” 

And it’s hard to beat Short Ride in a Fast Machine by John Adams if you want an encapsulation of a footrace at breakneck speed. Adams keeps orchestras on their toes with layered syncopation and rhythms that conductors fear almost as much as the Danse Sacral from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. 

Archery 

The easy answer here is the overture from the opera William Tell, but The Lone Ranger owns it and that’s that. Luckily, Erich Korngold gave us a better option, a piece called The Archery Tournament. It’s from his soundtrack to the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood. 

If you’re old enough to know who Errol Flynn was, close your eyes and you’ll see the swashbuckler’s face 10 bars into the music. If not, it’s still easy to conjure up a picture of faux-Medieval pageantry. Credit for some of this magic goes to orchestrator Milan Roder, but Korngold’s three minutes of pure gold set the standard for film pageantry, and it hasn’t lost its luster in 86 years. 

Fencing 

The most famous fencing musician has to be Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The Caribbean-born Black violinist, son of a Senegalese slave, used his legendary swordsmanship as an entree into 18th-century Parisian society. And some of his chamber music compositions seem to have sprung from his hours with an épée in his bow-hand. 

Bologne’s Sonata for Two Violins in B-Flat Major has all the interplay of a pair of dueling fencers. He punctuates moments of calm fluidity with virtuosic fire, and the second half is a “theme and variations” — exactly the form that fencing lessons take. You learn a move and then execute it in a dozen different ways, just like Bologne’s violinists.  

Football (okay, soccer) 

If you’ve paid attention to soccer, you know Nessun Dorma from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca became the sport’s unofficial anthem when Luciano Pavarotti sang it for the 1990 World Cup final in Rome. The legendary tenor’s 1972 recording of the aria actually hit #2 on the UK charts that summer, and he sang it again to open the 2006 winter games in Turin, Italy.  

It still holds up whenever Planet Earth’s most popular sport is played on the world’s biggest stages. The aria’s final word, vincerò (“I will win”), sung on a high B–natural, should ring out every time Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo slides on the turf after burying a strike in the back of the net. 

Taekwondo 

With the advent of the K-pop phenomenon, everything about Korea is hot — especially Taekwondo. After the World Taekwondo Demonstration Team got a Golden Buzzer during America’s Got Talent auditions in 2021, global interest in the martial art form skyrocketed.  

But Korean musical influences go far beyond BTS and BLACKPINK. Korean and Korean-American composers are bringing their nation’s harmonic flavor into Western concert halls. Some of it is perfect accompaniment for high-flying kicks and short-burst punches. The dramatic restraint in Warrior Legacy by Soon Hee Newbold also captures the self-control at the heart of all those physical pyrotechnics. And the music is so accessible that teenagers can play it. 

Cycling 

Olympic cycling has expanded to include mountain biking and BMX races, along with the more traditional road and track events. But no matter what kind of two-wheeled competition interests you, the fun of riding a bike is what connects us to the sport. 

So it’s not a stretch to consider Josef Strauss’s Vélocipède Polka the perfect anthem for pedaling your way down Vienna’s Ringstrasse, through the mountains of France, or even around the super-serious Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Vélodrome. Josef, the brother of Johann Strauss Jr., was also an engineer who invented a horse-drawn street sweeping machine with giant rotating brushes — so he probably also knew how to fix a broken chain and change a flat tire. 

Equestrian 

The premier event in equestrian competition has to be the Horse of the Year Show in the United Kingdom. And its theme song for decades has been the final movement from A Musical Joke by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  

Yes, the piece is a sort of parody of bad compositional techniques with its clumsy counterpoint, strange dissonances and friction-creating stops and starts. You might even consider it the embryo of the PDQ Bach phenomenon. (RIP, Peter Schickele.) But there’s no point trying to separate this music from the flashy pomp of well-dressed horses jumping over things. It just fits. 

Gymnastics 

Music for Olympic floor exercise routines has run the gamut from Percy Grainger and Astor Piazzola to The Devil Went Down to Georgia and the Mexican Hat Dance. But gymnasts still talk about the Ukrainian athlete Lilia Podkopayeva’s gold medal performance at the 1996 games in Atlanta. Her music? An instrumental version of Figaro’s entrance aria from The Barber of Seville. 

The cavatina “Largo al Factotum” is one of Gioachino Rossini’s most memorable vocal explosions, and it has the perfect driving pulses for gravity-defying tumbling passes. Podkopayeva also tossed in a bit of “Non più andrai” from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the end — Same character, different century! — reminding us of how much fun we can find in this music we all love. 

Rugby 

Gustav Host’s The Planets may seem like an odd match with the turf-tearing and blood-spilling game of Rugby, but World Rugby commissioned songwriter Charlie Skarbek to come up with an anthem for the game in 1991. He plucked the middle section out of Holst’s “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” movement and gave it lyrics. Here’s the first bite: 

There’s a dream, I feel 
So rare, so real 
All the world in union 
The world as one 
Gathering together 
One mind, one heart 
Every creed, every colour 
Once joined, never apart 

New Zealand soprano Kiri Te Kanawa recorded it, and “World in Union” was born. Every world-class rugger hears it in his or her sleep, and every Rugby World Cup opens with it. 

“Just to be the best I can, sets the goal for every man,” the song goes. “If I win, lose or draw, it's a victory for all.”