Oliver St John Gogarty won a bronze medal in the literature section of the arts competition at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games for his work Ode to the Tailteann Games, making him one of two Irish medal winners at those Games alongside Jack B. Yeats.

A member of the Irish Olympic Council and a Senator of the Irish Free State, Gogarty was one of the most colourful public figures of his era – a poet, wit, surgeon, aviator and close friend of James Joyce, who immortalised him as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.

A choral recital of his winning ode, arranged by Louis O’Brien, was performed at the Theatre Royal following the Games. His participation in the arts competition had an accidental connection to Yeats’ silver-medal winning painting The Liffey Swim: Gogarty himself had swum the Liffey in 1923, escaping after being kidnapped by anti-Treaty IRA and held captive at a house by the river at Islandbridge.