This yr’s Paris Olympics are the third to be held within the metropolis – the place the choice was made in 1894 to revive this historic Greek occasion – however the first for precisely 100 years. After paying homage to the Olympics’ origins by entrusting the primary fashionable Video games to Athens in 1896, the newly fashioned Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) determined that the second – and the primary of the brand new century – would happen in Paris in 1900.
Presently Paris was teeming with concepts, whether or not inventive, scientific or industrial. This ferment of innovation was epitomised by the world’s gala’s, the place the lots got here to marvel on the new and to marvel at humanity’s ingenuity and rising mastery of the world round them. An Exposition Universelle had already been earmarked for Paris that yr. The 1900 Olympics duly grew to become an adjunct to this, with the French state in a position to elbow apart the stripling IOC and form the Video games in step with its priorities of financial and army energy.
The outcome was a grand enterprise. Occasions befell over five-and-a-half months, from mid-Could to late-October. There have been nearly 59,000 members. These included athletes, swimmers, cyclists and fencers from world wide. However the ranks of rivals additionally encompassed nicely over 7,000 firefighters, 3,000 first aiders and 600 anglers. The programme was mounted by an internet of committees beneath a grand fee established by the French minister of commerce.
The story of this fairly astonishing pageant of sport is printed in a dense 795-page official report, bearing the heading of the French Ministry of Commerce, Trade, Postage and Telegraphs, versus any Olympic physique, and produced on the Imprimerie Nationale, answerable for printing official paperwork. The image that emerges is of a sprawling aggressive sports activities spectacular very a lot on the service of the French nation. First assist and firefighting had apparent social utility. However even the angling contest, staged on the banks of the Seine, was justified partly by a necessity to chop the invoice for freshwater fish imported from different international locations.
With new applied sciences advancing at a fast tempo, not least within the fields of transport and warfare, the Video games supplied a chance for testing efficiency ranges in demanding situations. Motorsports fashioned an intensive a part of the sports activities programme, with occasions together with reliability checks for hackney carriages, supply automobiles and even heavy vehicles, whether or not hydrocarbon-, electric- or steam-powered. There was additionally a gruelling long-distance race from Paris to Toulouse and again, a distance of some 1,400km.
The related part of the official report is laden with technical particulars about mechanisms deployed by the competing machines, together with pictures, in a way extra consistent with a motor present than a sports activities occasion. There’s additionally the occasional specific reminder of the seriousness of function underlying the contests. ‘One may be inclined to assume {that a} small bike (“motocyclette”) is an easy toy’, notes the report.
‘Nevertheless, an artillery commander … affirmed that with a talented mechanic an officer used to using tandem might simply flow into fairly quickly on a street the place a bike couldn’t cross.’
A preoccupation with army functions and nationwide defence is continuously obvious, maybe not surprisingly with the disastrous Franco-Prussian Battle of 1870-71 nicely inside residing reminiscence. The price of the numerous goal taking pictures contests outstripped that of another sport. There was, as well as, a contest for 90mm cannons, for French nationals solely, performed with no spectators current. Capturing is described within the report as ‘a sport so noble and so vital for the very existence of our pricey nation’.The doc additionally contains intensive remarks made by Common Jean Tricoche, with regards to the Second Boer Battle then raging, to the impact that the tempo of innovation in weaponry was such that frequent apply by males who may be known as upon ‘if conflict involves shock us’ was important.
One other function of the 1900 Olympics was a staggeringly bold practically four-month-long sequence of balloon competitions. These examined how excessive, far and precisely rivals – largely French – might journey amid the changeable winds of the Paris area. A few of the incidents befalling these intrepid balloonists might need been taken from a Jules Verne journey story. On touching down in rural Ain, west of Geneva, one contestant, recorded as ‘J. Faure’, was ‘taken for an English spy’. On one other event, Comte Henry de la Vaulx’s balloon was assailed by a nocturnal storm that noticed it contact speeds of over 100km an hour. ‘I feel it was a miracle that we escaped demise’, famous the balloon’s log-book.
Probably the most extraordinary happenings of all have been reserved for the final balloon race of the Video games, with rivals setting off from Vincennes on 9 October with a full moon in prospect. Exceptional distances have been lined, with the main contenders traversing Germany and reaching into japanese Europe. The runner-up, a Monsieur Balsan, who lastly touched down in south-central Poland, discovered himself flying low sufficient at one level to ask for instructions. He was answered by rifle photographs. The winner – de la Vaulx – saved going and going till he touched down not removed from Kyiv, greater than 1,900km from Paris.
As with the opposite sporting occasions on the 1900 Olympics, ballooning had a army utility; because the report bluntly reminds us, balloons, too, ‘are a conflict instrument’. Aviation was, furthermore, about to emerge as the subsequent transformative new know-how. Because the official report put it:
‘The 1900 “aérostation” competitors has given a recent impetus to this common motion … It has contributed considerably to data of the medium which we should now definitively conquer.’
Little question right now’s French politicians will hope to profit from the burst of patriotic delight that the Olympics typically engender. However on the subject of placing sport on the service of the nation, the 1900 Video games are unsurpassed.
David Owen is the writer of Aux Armes! Sport and the French, an English Perspective (Ahead Press, 2024).