The madcap Paris Olympics: the chaos that nearly derailed the 1900 Games

As Paris prepares to stage the Summer Olympics, David Goldblatt describes how the 1900 Games – the first held in the French capital – almost defeated the Olympic ideal before it was even out of the starting blocks

American athlete Alvin Kraenzlein pioneered the now-universal modern technique for hurdling – and claimed four golds. (Photo by Getty Images)

Published: July 25, 2024 at 2:43 PM

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To treat these events as world’s championships would be really an insult to the important events they are supposed to be. They are treated by most of the competitors as A HUGE JOKE.” That was the verdict of Australian sprinter Stanley Rowley on the Paris Olympics of 1900 – and he’d just won four medals.

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This summer, the world’s finest athletes will converge on the French capital once again for the latest edition of the sporting behemoth that is the Summer Olympics. In many ways, the competition will be returning home: the French capital may not have hosted the first modern Games, but it was unquestionably its birthplace. And, as Rowley’s words reveal all too clearly, that birth was a painful one.

In 1892, Pierre, Baron De Coubertin – then a little-known French sports administrator – organised a symposium at the city’s Sorbonne University, where he called for the revival of the ancient Greek Olympic Games in modern form. Two years and a lot of hustling later, De Coubertin held a full-blown conference, again in Paris, at which leading figures in the world of gentlemanly amateur sports gathered. It was here that they agreed to create an International Olympic Committee (IOC) and stage the first modern games, to be held in Athens in 1896.

Just 241 athletes made it to the Greek capital, competing in only nine sports. But that those Games happened at all after a hiatus of 1,500 years was remarkable. De Coubertin had rather higher hopes for the second edition of the modern Olympics, to take place in 1900, when the host city would be the French capital.

De Coubertin had long envisaged that the Paris Games would serve as the triumphant sporting component of the Exposition Universelle – the greatest of the world’s fairs of the belle époque – held that year in the city. What transpired instead was a shambolic melange of spats, misunderstandings, false starts and apathy that almost crushed the Olympic ideal before it had got out of the starting blocks.

In an early draft of plans for an ‘Athletic Exposition’, the baron had proposed staging the Paris Games “in an enclosure exactly reproducing the Altis at Olympia, in so far as the excavations and discoveries made up to that point had made it possible to recreate it”. He also suggested a programme of events similar to that of the 1896 Athens Olympics as the sporting component of the fair.

Alfred Picard, the civil servant in charge of the Exposition Universelle, thought differently. He considered the pagan neo-Hellenism of De Coubertin’s proposals to be an “absurd anachronism”, and that those games – exclusively for amateur gentlemen athletes – would be “cheap and unfit to represent the nation”.

The Olympics that wasn’t

Instead, the Exposition decided to put on its own sporting festival, the Concours Interna- tionaux d’Exercices Physiques et des Sports (International Competition of Physical Exercises and Sports). This featured national schools sports championships, popular pastimes such as angling and pigeon racing, new crazes including motorboat and motorbike racing, and professional events (with prize money) in shooting and cycling. That’s not to mention mass gymnastic and archery displays, plus firefighting and life-saving contests. De Coubertin would be permitted to stage a few amateur events around the city as a sideshow, but nothing more.

Undaunted, the baron continued to lobby his French political contacts to intervene, and tried to manoeuvre himself into a position of authority over at least some of the Concours’ events. But he was blocked at every turn.

In fact, he had been so marginalised by the organisers that, during the summer of 1900, he and other members of the IOC were reduced to running or cycling between events that others had organised, trying to deter- mine which ones could plausibly be considered ‘Olympic’.

The Parisian public were not enthusiastic. Crowds were thin everywhere; at the croquet competition, according to the official report, “Spectators were not at all numerous; al- though I must mention an English lover of the game who made the journey from Nice to Paris... unless I am very much mistaken, however, this gentleman was the only paying spectator.” The press was just confused, referring to these occasions as the “festival games”, “international games” and “the Olympian festival”.

To all intents and purposes, as far as the world was aware, there was no 1900 Olympics Games. Or, rather, there was something approximating the Games, but without an opening ceremony, laurels or any mention in the official Exposition programme, and few medals (though these were awarded retrospectively several years later).

The final sporting schedule did, though – and contrary to De Coubertin’s preferences – feature women. His stated position was that “an Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper”. Having lost control of the agenda of Paris 1900, however, De Coubertin and the IOC were not able to exclude women from the games as they had done, in effect, at Athens in 1896, where all 241 participants had been men.

Of 997 athletes in Paris, 22 were women, competing in golf, tennis, equestrianism, croquet and sailing – albeit some by unlikely routes. In 1899, like many wealthy Americans of the era, Mary Abbott and her daughter Margaret, then living in Chicago, set sail for Paris. There, Mary, a novelist and journalist, would write, Margaret would study art, and both would attend the Exposition.

Olympic competition was not part of their plans. However, both were keen golfers – Margaret had been recognised in the Chicago press for winning local competitions and possessing a “classy backswing” – so when they saw the competition announced in 1900 both signed up. Margaret shot a 47 and won the nine-hole tournament, receiving a large por- celain bowl, while Mary carded 65 to finish seventh. They were the first mother-daughter duo to compete in an Olympic event.

Ad hoc at best

Briton Charlotte Cooper, who had already won three times at Wimbledon, took first place in the women’s singles tennis event. At least two Frenchwomen competed in croquet, and Italian Elvira Guerra and Frenchwomen Jane Moulin and Blanche de Marcigny took part in the hacks and hunter equestrian competition, a mix of simple dressage manoeuvres and low jumps.

The team sport competitions were ad hoc at best. The cricket event, originally slated to be contested by teams representing Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Great Britain, was reduced to a single match after those first two teams withdrew. In effect, it proved to be a match between Britons – the Great British team being the touring Devon and Somerset Wanderers, and the French team largely comprising British expats living in Paris. Players were awarded miniature statues of the Eiffel Tower for their troubles.

Football was a three-way affair between English amateurs Upton Park, Club Français and a bunch of Belgians – university stu- dents and players from various clubs – though there was not enough time for them to all play each other. Moseley Wanderers, the English entrants in a similarly tiny rugby competition, arrived, played and left on the same day without even being aware that they were competing in the Olympics. Gold went to France, whose centre, the Haitian-French medical student Constantin Henriquez, was the first black athlete to compete at the Olympic Games, and the first to win a gold medal.

Team composition was even more laidback for the polo event: four of the teams mixed Irish, British, Mexican, American and French players, and players were even permitted to compete for more than one team.

Marathon mayhem

The organisation of the marathon was emblematic of the overall chaos that characterised the Games. The event was poorly signed and virtually unmarshalled, and runners had to compete for space with the bikes, coaches and trams that thronged the streets of Paris.

When the hot favourite, American Arthur Newton, crossed the finishing line he believed that he’d won the race. It soon transpired, though, that a Swede and three French athletes had finished ahead of him – despite the fact he said no other athlete had overtaken him. Rumours circulated that the winner, named Michel Théato, was a local baker’s delivery boy who had used his knowledge of the city’s backstreets to gain an unfair advantage.

Ion Pool, a British competitor, certainly had his doubts. “The marathon turned out to be a dismal fiasco,” he later recalled. “The whole conduct of the race... and the entire absence of precautions to ensure fair play can only be characterised by the one word: Preposterous – with a capital P.” Dick Grant, a Canadian who finished sixth, even mounted a legal case against the IOC, claiming that at a crucial point in the race he had been run over by a cyclist.

The pole vault proved equally contentious. Initially scheduled for a Sunday, the presence of many devout Christian US competitors who wouldn’t compete on the sabbath persuaded organisers to reschedule the event for Monday. However, the decision was then taken to shift the event back to Sunday – without telling those sabbatarians. So it was held without them, and was won by another American, Irving Baxter.

Unsurprisingly, the irate churchgoers protested, and further pole vault competitions were staged on the Monday and Thursday, won by two of those sabbatarians, Bascom Johnson and Dan Horton. The controversy didn’t end there, however; officials refused to recognise these later events, and confirmed Baxter as champion. They did, though, offer Horton a compensation prize – an umbrella.

The coxed four rowing competition also encountered problems. Three semi-finals were held, with the winners and one runner- up going through to compete in the final. However, two teams eliminated in the second and third semi-finals recorded faster times than the winner of the first semi-final – un- surprisingly, again, they protested vociferously. The organisers then planned to stage a final with six boats – but, because the course was designed for just four, this was clearly impossible. The compromise decision was to stage two finals, each with just three boats – with the result that all six competing teams won medals of one colour or another.

Publicity gold

The IOC did, though, enjoy one PR triumph and showcase one real star at these games: the American Alvin Kraenzlein. He won four gold medals, in the 60-metre sprint, the 110-metre and 200-metre hurdles, and the long jump. Kraenzlein pioneered the modern technique for hurdling, leading with one leg lifted over the hurdles before the other, instead of using the existing mode of leaping with both legs tucked under the body. He was also noted for his dress sense: in Paris he wore an Eton collar, a silk cravat and a rakish cap.

Over the following decades, the IOC never fully resolved which of the events that had taken place over the summer of 1900 should be considered Olympic; nor did it establish consistent criteria for making this decision. In his 1998 book on Paris 1900, Bill Mallon – a leading authority on the history of the Games – suggested that for an event to be considered Olympic, it had to be fully amateur, with international participation, and open to all without handicapping. Only after Mallon’s pronouncement was a final medal table for the 1900 Games compiled.

Things were marginally better four years later. The 1904 Games were held, much to De Coubertin’s irritation, in St Louis, Missouri as a small athletic appendage to the giant World’s Fair, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. De Coubertin had planned for the games to be staged in Chicago, hosted by his blue-blooded friends at the university there, but the organisers of the exposition refused to countenance a competing event being staged in the US in the same year.

(In 1906, though, the Greek royal family collaborated with a few renegade members of the IOC to hold an alternative Olympic Games in Athens.) De Coubertin refused to attend these events in St Louis and Athens, and focused instead on the fourth modern Games, staged in London in 1908. Now firmly under his control, and graced by the British royal family, this edition was much more to the baron’s liking. However, it was, like earlier iterations, subsumed into another spectacle – the popular Franco-British Exhibition at what is now White City in London. It wasn’t until 1912, and the fifth Games in Stockholm, that the Olympics stood alone as a spectacle, and its ascent to global sporting domination could begin.

Not surprisingly, De Coubertin later looked back on the chaos of 1900, and remarked: “It’s a miracle the Olympic movement survived these Games.”

Wacky races: 5 more Olympic events that encapsulate the chaos of Paris 1900

Tug of war: American pulling power

The Paris edition of the New York Herald was outspoken, to say the least, in its criticism of the organisation of the tug of war competition in the 1900 Olympics, citing it as “an object lesson in how not to do a thing”. The event should have been a contest between Racing Club de France and a US team. However, three of the Americans were also hammer throwers and, with their event clashing with the tug of war, the team withdrew. At the last minute, a Scandinavian team comprising Danes and Swedes was assembled, beating the French in a best-of- three competition. The US press, however, considered their team the winners after the Americans beat the Scandinavians in an unofficial contest a few days later. The French press reported that the American victory was questionable: a group of their supporters came onto the field and joined the team, ensuring victory.

Swimming: The fast lane

This summer, we won’t see aquatic obstacle racing or competitive underwater swimming – both of which featured at the 1900 Games. In the former, competitors had to climb over a wooden obstacle, then swim to a line of rowing boats into which they had to clam- ber then dive off, before swimming under a second row of boats. The race was won by Australian Frederick Lane, who received a large bronze statue of a horse. The subaquatic athletes were awarded points according to how long they stayed underwater, and how far they travelled. Frenchman Charles Devendeville won gold by staying under for one minute and eight seconds after reaching the maximum distance of 60 metres.

Jumps: The human frog

The extraordinary American athlete Ray Ewry (right) won three gold medals in a single day, competing in the now-discontinued standing jump events. Eschewing a run up, and with their feet placed firmly on the ground, competitors took on the high jump, long jump and triple jump. Ewry, dubbed ‘the human frog’, soared an amazing 1.65 metres in the high jump and 3.30 metres in the long jump. His achievements seem even more astonishing when you consider that in childhood Ewry used a wheelchair after a bout of polio, before rebuilding his strength and mobility through athletics. He won seven more gold medals: at St Louis in 1904, the Intercalated Olympic Games in Athens in 1906, and London in 1908.

Ballooning: Flying into trouble

Considered at the time to be an Olympic discipline, and certainly the province of amateurs, the 1900 ballooning competitions (or exhibitions) proved an epic affair. Participants beneath gas-filled balloons set off from Le Parc d’aerostation in Paris, attempting to fly as far as possible, for as long as possible or as high as possible. In the long-distance event, second-placed Jacques Balsan made it to a spot south of Warsaw in what’s now Poland. But the winner was the French aeronautical pioneer Henry de la Vaulx who, flying with Georges Castillon de Saint-Victor, flew around 1,200 miles to land near Kiev (now Kyiv), at the time in tsarist Russia, in nearly 36 hours. On landing he was taken into police custody, having failed to file a passport request with the Russian government.

Pigeons: ... dead or alive

Pigeons featured in the competitions at the Exposition Universelle not once but twice. There was a huge and popular pigeon-racing competition for the bird lovers, and a live pigeon shooting contest for the hunters, won by Belgian Léon de Lunden. The IOC has, retrospectively, declined to classify pigeon shooting as an Olympic event – not, it seems, for ethical reasons, but because there was a very considerable cash prize for the contestants who could blast the most birds out of the sky, making it a professional sport. More than 300 pigeons met their ends during that event in the 1900 Olympics and, to the relief of animal welfare advocates, it was replaced at the 1904 Olympics by clay pigeon shooting.

David Goldblatt is a sports writer, broadcaster and journalist. His books include The Games: A Global History of the Olympics (Macmillan, 2016)

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This article was first published in the August 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

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