FASTER, HIGHER, FURTHER ...MEANER.

THE PARIS OLYMPICS OPEN WITH RUGBY. HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS.

As the Olympics loom, locals are talking up their chances in the first sports to be contested. Latest is Antoine Dupont, captain of France’s rugby football team, who calls an Olympic gold medal “the holy grail of the sport, as simple as that.”  Lately Fiji has taken most of the gongs, but history shows it doesn’t do to forecast results in this sport.

           After the disastrous 1900 Games in Paris, marred by squabbling between rival ruling bodies, flagrant cheating, and an eccentric choice of sports - croquet, balloon racing, pigeon shooting with live pigeons - Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who re-invented the modern Olympiad, hoped that the 1924 Olympiad, his last, would redeem the reputation of his home city. Amsterdam had already been chosen as the host, but he persuaded the committee to give Paris another chance.

           The Olympics have a long association with Rugby football. It was invented at Rugby School, Warwickshire, the innovative headmaster of which, Thomas Arnold, was a friend of de Coubertin and influenced his decision to revive the modern Games.

           Rugby is famed for being hard, tough and dirty, a reputation its players often seem anxious to maintain. Injuries are the badge of courage. Missing front teeth are common; likewise cauliflower ears, bandaged joints and surgical scars.

           Tribalism plays a large part in international rugby. The New Zealand All Blacks precede each match with the haka, their version of a Maori war dance in which, to terrify their enemies, tribesmen stamped, shouted and made faces. 

Haka at the World Rugby Cup Final between New Zealand and France.

From the moment rugby became popular in France, it had an edge of violence. According to a history of the French game, it has been “associated with the small-town communities of the southwest and the long history of resistance towards the centre in these areas...Racism and sexism [are] normalized by the symbolic boundaries and myths of belonging of the imaginary community.”

           The Olympics admitted rugby as a sport at the 1900 Games, when a local team won gold. In 1920 the French took gold again, and were widely tipped to win in 1924. Not for the last time, however, politics intervened, leading to one of Olympics' most disreputable incidents.

           Since the armistice of 1918, France had struggled to extract from a bankrupt Germany the reparations promised as the price of peace. In particular it demanded the return of the border region of Alsace-Lorraine, lost in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 but ceded back under the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1923, frustrated by the slow progress of the transfer, France sent troops into Alsace to seize the factories and mines of its richest region, the Ruhr. Britain and the United States brokered a compromise which required France to withdraw and accept reduced repayments.  Feeling cheated, the French dragged their feet, which brought, just before the Games began in July 1924, a stinging rebuke from the American government.

           This was the climate in which American athletes, including its rugby team, arrived in Paris. French officialdom neglected no opportunity to show its displeasure. Their luggage was searched minutely by Customs, and items stolen. Players had trouble finding their way to the Olympic village, the first time this amenity was provided, and were denied the chance to practice. Parisians spat at them in the street.

           Tensions increased as the rugby final approached.  50,000 spectators filled the Stade Colombes, recently upgraded with new stands and metal barriers to prevent spectators from invading the pitch. But the game between France and the United States was a grudge match from the start. Fights broke out in the crowd and American supporters, outnumbered, were badly beaten. The match was delayed as the crowd, silent, watched the battered and bloodied victims passed over their heads to ambulances.

           Within minutes of the game starting again, the French captain was carried off with a broken nose. Disquiet increased in the crowd as the American team ran rings around its opponents. Had there been no barriers,  the match,  which America won 17-3, might have ended in a riot.  As it was, an uproar marred the medal ceremony.  Catcalls drowned out the Star Spangled Banner, and the Americans were forced to flee through an escape tunnel, pursued by an angry crowd. They had been back home for three months before their medals finally and grudgingly arrived.  Rugby disappeared as an Olympic event after this debacle but made a comeback of sorts at the 2006 Rio Games in a modified seven-a-side form.

           None of this, incidentally, found its way into the following official account, which refers to the match as no more than “bruising”.