Paris 2024: Missing in Action: Coubertin and the 1924 Games, Robert Lewis

The Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris was joyfully creative, bizarre, and entertaining. At a personal level, I enjoyed it from start to finish. My two elementary-school-aged children were captivated by the spectacle. This Opening Ceremony seemed to have something for just about everyone, from the parkour exploits of the mysterious masked torchbearer to the boat-after-boat of athletes grinning and waving in the rain to the stunning final lighting of the balloon-cauldron by French Olympic heroes Marie-José Pérec and Teddy Riner. 

What the Opening Ceremony really didn’t include, however, was much attention to the Parisian founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, or to the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Paris Summer Olympic Games. The broadcast commentary (at least on American television) briefly referenced Coubertin and the inaugural Olympic Congress held at the Sorbonne in 1894. The ceremony itself also mentioned Coubertin’s creation of the Olympic rings in 1913, and featured a rapid-fire video montage that included some footage from the 1924 Games. But that was all. The closest the ceremony came to Coubertin or 1924 otherwise was the inclusion of 100-year-old former Olympian Charles Coste, the oldest living French gold medalist, in the torch relay.  

In truth, I wasn’t really surprised by either development, particularly the near-total omission of Coubertin. The French daily sports newspaper L’Equipe had reported in February that Coubertin was going to be the “grand absent” of the 2024 Olympic Games. While the article focused on the failure of a recent campaign to have Coubertin re-interred at the Panthéon, author Vincent Hube suggested that no formal recognition of Coubertin would be forthcoming at the Games. As L’Equipe acknowledged, the Baron was a complex and problematic historical figure. Coubertin’s writings were laced with racist and anti-Semitic sentiments; he lauded, on more than one occasion, the superiority of the “white race.” He also did not vocally denounce the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Nazi Germany, and strongly opposed the participation of women in most Olympic events. (Indeed, women were excluded from track and field events until the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, after Coubertin’s departure as the head of the International Olympic Committee). And even if Coubertin’s racism and hostility to female sport were not exceptionally outside of the norm in the context of his own era, he was also seen by many contemporaries (as historian Patrick Clastres observes) as an “elitist aristocrat with uncertain republicanism” (L’Equipe, February 17, 2024). 

The decision to leaving Coubertin largely off-screen was thus an understandable choice on the part of the organizers of the Opening Ceremony and the Games themselves. One might have thought, however, that the centennial of the 1924 Paris Games might have been something to foreground (at least a little bit!) at this Opening Ceremony. But I can also see why the 1924 Games didn’t make the cut. Those Games certainly featured some outstanding athletic performances, such as those of British and American sprinters (depicted in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire), Finnish distance runners (Paavo Nurmi and Ville Ritola), and American swimmers (e.g. Johnny Weissmuller, who later went on to star as Tarzan in twelve movies). At the same time, the 1924 Games were also an incoherent, poorly-organized affair that stretched over two months; they failed to make a profit and were not terribly well-attended. As the daily sports newspaper L’Auto complained at the time, “The Games descend by degrees into almost general indifference, and finish up in almost mediocre fashion.” Perhaps most importantly, the 1924 Olympics —while ostensibly hosted by Paris—largely took place in the somewhat dingy suburb of Colombes, eight kilometers to the northwest, where the Olympic stadium had been constructed due in large part to the reluctance of the Paris municipal council to fund an Olympic stadium closer to the heart of the capital. But even if the 1924 Olympic Games had been held in Paris proper, they were staged in a different era than our present one; at the time, sporting events like the Games were not yet envisioned as tools of civic and national promotion, as they clearly are today. 

Ultimately, the Opening Ceremony for these 2024 Paris Games didn’t need to dwell on Coubertin or the distant French Olympic past to work its magic. Still, as a historian of French sport and those 1924 Olympics, I was selfishly a little disappointed by those omissions. That is why I found myself so elated two days later, when I found myself randomly watching field hockey, of all things. (This is not intended as a slight against field hockey, but it’s not a sport that I typically watch or follow, even during the Olympics). As the camera panned around the venue for the event, I realized that it was none other than the old Stade Yves-du-Manoir—the stadium built for the Olympic Games in Colombes in 1924. I had forgotten that the old stadium, which also played host to the 1938 World Cup and many international soccer and rugby matches up through the early 1970s, was even being included in the 2024 Olympic program. But here it was on my television—a refurbished, slimmed-down version of the old installation, replete with garish blue artificial turf, but still sporting its unmistakable central grandstand, so lauded by contemporaries upon its completion in the 1920s. And it was in that moment, when a tangible connection to the history of the Olympics and French sport emerged onto my screen, that the 2024 Olympics really began for me. 

Robert W. Lewis is an associate professor of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He specializes in modern European history, with a focus on France, the history of sport, and digital methodologies. He is the author of The Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Society in Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as several other journal articles and book chapters.