Of all the programmes broadcast in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games, I don't think I have enjoyed any as much as yesterday's Olympic Arts (Radio 4), Mark Whitaker's finely researched examination of just how barking was Pierre de Frédy, the Baron de Coubertin.

The founder of the modern Olympics, he was the perfect combination of visionary and obsessive. He rode roughshod over difficulties and objections in his attempt to first get the world to compete against itself physically, and then, when that worked, tackled the other part of his dream, competitive creativity.

In 1906 he told a conference in Paris that by the next Olympics he wanted architects, painters, sculptors, musicians and writers to come up with new work on the theme of sport by the time of the next Games. The winners in each category would receive the usual medals. The delegates said that they didn't think it would work because a) there wasn't enough time, and b) artists wouldn't be interested because there wasn't any money in it. De Coubertin was adamant. “Deprived of the aura of the arts contests,” he would later say, “the Olympic Games are only world championships.”

Sadly, the time factor prevented the scheme getting off the ground in time for the 1908 London Olympics, but the organisers of the 1912 Games in Stockholm had no such excuse and, grudgingly and only because de Coubertin shouted at them, the entry forms went out - and virtually nothing came in. The literature contest was so feebly subscribed that it was no surprise that the winning entry, a nine-stanza poem called Sport (“Sport, you are beauty, you are justice, you are bravery”) turned out to have been written by De Coubertin himself, under an alias.

The music prizes for the 1924 Paris Olympics were judged by a glittering panel that included Bartók, Ravel and Honegger, which decided that none of the entries were deserving of a medal. By the Amsterdam Olympics four years later, though, a relaxing and widening of the rules, which meant that practically anything fulfilled the entry criteria, meant that William Nicolson could land a gold medal for some woodcuts he'd made more than 30 years earlier. They were accompanied by some verses by Rudyard Kipling, which included this, on cricket, beginning: “Thank God who made the British Isles, and taught me how to play/ I do not worship crocodiles, or bow the knee to clay.”

The arts Olympics outlived de Coubertin's death in 1937 - just. The next Games, in London in 1948, were the last in which the mind was rewarded as much as the body.

Before I go, just time to note the latest crass observation by Henry Blofeld on Test Match Special (5 Live Extra, Radio 4 longwave), in which he described the full-bearded and devoutly Muslim South African Hashim Amla as looking “like an Old Testament prophet.” Stick to counting buses, Henry.

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