Elite sport in 1924 was both vital and political. Now, it is merely commercial. This was epitomised by the fact that during the 2024 opening ceremony the person who did most to foster the re-establishment of the Olympic Games after the catastrophe of World War One, and who oversaw Paris’s hosting of the Games in 1924, was completely overlooked. That person was Frantz Reichel.
Frantz Reichel (1871–1932) was the leading figure in French sport, having an impact on its development as athlete, journalist and administrator. He was the chief evangelist for the vision of Pierre de Coubertin, carving out a role for himself as the pre-eminent sporting intellectual in France. And he had an impact on society far beyond that of a mere journalist-promoter of ‘the virtues of physical fitness … instrumental in sprinkling small stadiums’ throughout Paris, as June Hargrove characterises him. The journalist Géo Lefèvre, who inspired Henri Desgrange to create the Tour de France, referred to him as ‘the man who created French sport’. Reichel’s greatest and most enduring achievement was to campaign for Paris to host the 1924 Olympic Games. The focal point for the event was the Stade de Colombes, which was built in the grounds of the élite Racing Club de Paris of which Reichel himself was a member.
Reichel died prematurely a heart attack at the age of 61 at his desk at Le Figaro, after a lifetime of struggle in the cause of raising the public standing of sport. A crowd of 10,000 attended his funeral service, including a range of leading personalities from public life. Not only did his premature death provoke an outpouring of grief across the sporting community, it also prompted an immediate appeal for private subscriptions to erect a memorial to the memory of a man that section of that sporting community saw as incarnating French sport during his lifetime. The condition of the public monument to Frantz Reichel’s current state—it sits largely forgotten in a little frequented corner by the Périphérique in western Paris—belies the fact that at the moment of its unveiling it acted as a dramatic public statement of the amateur ideology in sport. Reichel was the intransigent defender of sporting amateurism whose unyielding opposition to professionalism, especially in rugby and football, made him the most divisive figure in the French sporting world in the early 1930s.
Hence it is no surprise that the organisers of the 2024 opening ceremony overlooked him for commemoration. For the first time in Olympic history prize money will be awarded to gold medal winners at Paris 2024. World Athletics has created a prize pot of $2.4 million to fund payments of $50,000 each for gold medal winners in track and field events. This will be extended to silver and bronze medallists at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, and who can be in any doubt that where athletics has led others will follow? Of course, this would be anathema to Reichel, but few people nowadays would argue against athletes’ right to make their living through their trade. One might raise an eyebrow, however, at the gold medals being presented in a Louis Vuitton-created box tacitly sponsored by France’s richest man, the luxury goods entrepreneur Bernard Arnault.
But payment to play wasn’t the only thing that concerned Reichel about the potential breakdown of the amateur ideal. Looking at photographs of the 1924 opening ceremony on 5th July the pictures make a compelling contrast with those of the ceremony on 26th July. A moderately full crowd of around 25,000 at the Stade de Colombes bathes in sunshine while the athletes parade past. Following the parade, the President of the Republic gave a short speech proclaiming the opening of the Games, whose termination saw the release of thousands of doves of peace while Saint-Saëns’ Marche Héroique played. A final speech by the French athlete Géo André, promising on behalf of all the athletes to respect the rules of competition for the honour of their countries and the glory of sport, preceded a final parade as the assembled athletes of forty-five nations exited the stadium.
Compare this with the four-hour long bombast of the 2024 ceremony in which a bewildering variety of entertainment was viewed in the pouring rain by a crowd of 350,000 along the Seine and a global television and online audience in the millions. Participating athletes on their wet barges on the river seemed a sideshow compared to the Hollywood Babylon quayside and superannuated athletes whizzing up and down in speedboats. For Reichel the opening ceremony should be a simple exercise in which the athletes are the focus of the crowd’s attention. He was chiefly concerned with participation and warned that sport as spectacle was the logical outcome of the rejection of amateur values. This is why a little of Reichel’s thinking would be a welcome corrective to the trajectory of the modern Games. Why not rehabilitate his statue and place it beside that of that other great French Olympian of the 1920s, Alice Milliat, who was rightly honoured in the opening ceremony? He’s been stuck in the long grass for too long.
Geoffrey Levett received his PhD in history from Birkbeck College, University of London in 2014. He is the author of ‘A certain idea of “Le Sport français”: the monument Frantz Reichel and the contest for the soul of French sport’ in French History.
