A flippant expose of the country and people hosting this year’s Paris Olympics. Senior Correspondent Mike Osborne looks at France’s fascination with the five ringed circus.
You can take the Olympics out of France but you can’t take the French out of the Olympics.
In addition to adding a distinctive layer of Gallic glamour and class to the Games, the French have also included some left-field events including live pigeon shooting and obstacle swimming races in the River Seine. Both wacky one-off events were won by Australians.
Live pigeons were used as targets in the shooting for the first and only time at the 1900 Paris Olympics. Melbourne’s “Dead Eye” Donald Mackintosh, considered the finest shot in the world at the time despite being blind in his left eye, won gold thanks to 22 successive pigeon kills.
Meanwhile Australian swimmer Freddie Lane dived into the murky and fast-flowing River Seine at the same Games to win the 200m “Olympic” obstacle race by swimming under punts and clambering over row boats. Really!
Those Paris 1900 Games are now widely considered the worst ever. Some sports were contested for the first and only time in Olympic history, including car and motorbike racing, ballooning, croquet and cricket (which is set to return at the 2028 Los Angeles Games).
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Games, once remarked: “It’s a miracle the Olympic movement survived.”
The main reason the Games did survive was that the French Baron spent his entire fortune, and that of his rich German-born wife, supporting the movement over the next three decades before he dying virtually bankrupt.
While the ancient Olympic Games date back to 776 BC and endured for some 1200 years, the modern version is only 130 years old thanks to the passionate de Coubertin who proposed their reintroduction at a Paris Sorbonne University conference in 1894.
That conference unanimously decided to relaunch the Olympics with Athens to host the first event in 1896 followed by Paris four years later in 1900. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was born with Coubertin as secretary general and later president until 1925. He remained Honorary President for another 12 years until his death.
Despite its noble ambitions the Modern Olympic didn’t have a very auspicious start. Only 14 nations competed in Athens 1896, followed by the Paris 1900 disaster; the 1904 Games in St Louis, Missouri were shambolic; and plans for the 1908 Games in Rome were blown up by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1906.
But Coubertin’s money and the growing popularity of sport in the early 20th century saw the Olympics endure and eventually prosper, but without ever losing their “French flavour”.
These Games mark the third summer Olympics to be staged in Paris and the sixth overall to be held in France including three winter Games.
The only country to have hosted more Olympics is the USA with eight, and the only other cities to have hosted three summer Games in the modern era are London, and soon to be Los Angeles after the 2028 event.
French is also one of only two official Olympic languages along with English. And France is one of only three nations to have competed at every Summer and Winter Games along with Great Britain and Switzerland.
The sport of Modern Pentathlon was actually created by de Coubertin as a tribute to the noble French soldier riding a horse to battle, fighting the enemy with pistol and sword, then swimming and running to safety. It’s evolved over time but the sport still contains those five disciplines.
Paris organisers can only hope that this year’s Olympics are as successful as the 1924 version which helped Coubertin’s dream to fly a century ago.
Those Hollywood Games launched the film career of triple American freestyle swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller who went on to star as Tarzan and Jungle Jim in more than a dozen films.
Other 1924 stars included Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiin noble who made the sport of surfing famous world wide; and the “Flying Finn” Paavo Nurmi who is considered one of the greatest distance runners of all time after winning five gold medals including the 1500m and 5000m which were held only an hour apart.
These Games also inspired the 1982 Academy Award winning film “Chariots of Fire” which featured the journeys of British track and field legends Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell who won the 100m and 400m gold medals respectively.
The question is: will Hollywood also come calling again to immortalise these Paris 2024 Games or will they get buried by the annals of time like the dead pigeons from 1900?
NOTE – This is the latest in a series of “Frivolous facts about France for Olympic bon vivants”. You can read other Frivolous Facts stories by clicking on these topics: Language
Michael Osborne has been a journalist for more than four decades including 35 years with the national news agency Australian Associated Press, rising from junior reporter to Editor.
He was AAP Editor for 11 years and served four years as Head of Sport and Racing. He was also posted to London and Beijing as AAP’s Bureau Chief and Foreign Correspondent.
He has worked at six Olympics and five Commonwealth Games, covered tennis grand slams, golf majors, international cricket, rugby world cups and numerous sporting world championships. He also co-ordinated and managed AAP’s teams and coverage at three Olympic Games in Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
Discussion about this post