Medal Heads

Is Olympus a mythic mountain or a state of mind? Maybe it's a musculature. Herb Ritts has photographed 13 athletes—some of whom set the gold standard in Atlanta, circa 1996—in the nude, in black and white, in Miami Beach and L.A. And suddenly they look like gamboling godheads! There are Atlas-eternal action shots straight out of classical Greek sculpture, torsos that nod to Rilke's Apollo, and Art Deco curves in the manner of Leni Riefenstahl (or is it Mapplethorpe, who borrowed mightily from Riefenstahl's Olympia?). There's also a pinch of Pirelli Calendar: see Jean Galfione, the French pole-vaulter, do The Thinker in the waves.

This traveling exhibition of 40 photographs is the result of an imaginative advertising campaign by TAG Heuer which celebrates the Swiss company's new sports watch, the Kirium. The exhibition gets set and goes in New York this month, travels to Los Angeles, and then on to 38 more museums and galleries around the world. The list of superstar bods includes tennis great Boris Becker (the strawberriest of blonds), swimmer Amy Van Dyken (siren-sleek), decathlon gold medalist Dan O'Brien (moon over Miami!), and, perhaps the most beautiful shot of all, Swiss track-and-fielder Anita Weyerman, her hamstrings "like a tightened bow." The simile is Yeats, of course, describing none other than Helen of Troy.

LAURA JACOBS