Sztafeta, Warsaw

Sztafeta is Adam Roman’s architectural sculpture at the Stadion Narodowy entrance by Józef Poniatowski Avenue. It presents three nude runners, with a baton being handed between two of them. The linked figures turn a fleeting sporting gesture into something permanent.

Roman drew on painted Greek vessels and on François Rude’s La Marseillaise relief on Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The work was meant for park steps in Powiśle, but Jerzy Hryniewiecki, who designed the Tenth-Anniversary Stadium, secured this stadium setting instead. Rushed into being for the stadium inauguration, it was built in concrete around a steel armature, roughly two metres high, on a stone-clad pedestal about two and a half metres tall.

Its unveiling came on the twenty-second of July nineteen fifty-five. A proposed bronze version never replaced it. The concrete weathered poorly, so Jacek Nowicki restored the sculpture in November two thousand eight. A granite plaque on the pedestal, designed by Ryszard Stry, was added in twenty thirteen to honour Roman after his death.