Artist’s impression of the 2024 Olympic opening ceremony on the River Seine.
This week, applications opened for the lottery to decide who gets tickets to the 2024 Olympics, the first to be contested here since 1924. Winners will be announced in February and given 48 hours to choose three events to attend. There’s no guarantee they’ll get the seats they ask for, but in the spirit of “It’s not the winning but the taking part,” those hoping for the final of the 100 metres or the marathon will no doubt be just as excited watching water polo, BMX biking or golf.
The French aren’t particularly sportif. Admittedly Paris does hold its breath for the final stage of the Tour de France, culminating in that sprint down the Champs Elysées, and when the World Cup football takes place at the Stade de France, the roar as a goal is scored will echo across the city. Most fans, however, are watching comfortably at home or, glass in hand, in some café with a giant TV screen.
With hopes of involving us more actively in the Olympics, Madame Hidalgo, our militant Green and bike-loving mayor, has decided that, if we won’t go to the Games, she will bring them to us. Rather than building expensive new venues on the outskirts of the city, events will take place in existing buildings and spaces: for example Roland Garros, site of the annual hard-court championships, for tennis and badminton, and the gardens designed by Lenotre for Louis XIV at Versailles for the equestrian events. Other sports will use the waters of the Seine – extensively disinfected, one hopes - or the streets of Paris itself. (I’m told one heat of the three-a-side basketball will be played in our living room.)
The Grand Palais ephemere, seen from the Eiffel Tower.
Like Madame H’s attempts to ban automobiles from the city and turn some of its more scenic thoroughfares, including the Champs Elysées, into “urban forests”, these decisions have already produced some grumbles. There are few fans, for example, of the massive prefab Grand Palais éphémère or temporary Grand Palais that defaces the Champ-de-Mars. (They promise to dismantle it after the Games - but they said that about the Eiffel Tower in 1889.)
Sports purists have also protested the inclusion of skateboarding, surfing, sport climbing and break-dancing among the competitions, at the expense of karate, baseball and softball. One wonders how they would have viewed some of the events featured in earlier Olympics. These included hot-air balloon racing, croquet, mountain-climbing and pigeon shooting - using live pigeons.
Back then, sportsmanship was also in shorter supply. Cheating was wide-spread and partisanship often carried to extremes. A French boxer was disqualified for biting his opponents. Next day, police had to be called when - shades of Donald Trump - supporters carried him into the stadium on their shoulders and boosted him into the ring, demanding he be reinstated.
Foreshadowing the US boycott in 1980 and the USSR’s reciprocal withdrawal in 1984, the US chose the eve of the 1924 Games to censure France for illegally seizing territory in the border region of Alsace as an incentive for Germany to pay its war debt. As a result, irate locals spat on American athletes in the street. Their belongings were stolen, and they were denied accommodation and opportunities to practice.
The rugby football final between the US and France, then world leader in the sport, became a grudge match. As a French player was carried off with a broken nose, the crowd turned on American spectators in the stands and beat them up. After the US won 17-3, shouts drowned out the playing of the American anthem, and officials hustled the visitors out of the stadium ahead of what could have been a lynching.
The proceedings are more amicable these days, fortunately. I’ll probably be a glued to the TV as much as anyone, despite an antipathy towards any form of vigorous physical activity.
Vaclac Nijinsky, Ludmilla Schollar and Tamara Karsavina in Jeux, 1913.
One also hopes that, in line with earlier Olympiads, a few cultural events will be provided for the more sedentary among us - an opportunity, I suggest, to revive one of the rare examples of sport turned to art.
In 1913, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premiered Jeux (Games), a ballet to music by Debussy, choreographed and danced by Vaclac Nijinsky and based on a tennis match. A trio play until their ball gets lost in the greenery surrounding the court. “Surprised and frightened,” Nijinsky wrote of what follows, “the young man and the two young girls disappear into the depths of the nocturnal park.” As previous generations of French men and woman used to say by way of expressing enthusiasm “Vive le sport!”
GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
Great review of the Olympic Games—past, present, and future. You have given me a good reason to forego my usual trip to Paris at that time. I was just there during the transportation strike and Black Friday in November. Even on those days, the crowds made Paris a city I couldn’t recognize as the one I loved!