Faster, higher, stronger.

Welcome back to The Land of Desire, a French history podcast dedicated to exploring all the weird adventures, mysteries and surprising backstories behind French cultural icons. I originally intended to follow up my episode on the Siege of Paris with the beginning of a series on the Commune. Instead, I found myself glued to my TV screen, obsessed with the Olympics the way I always am every few years, and I remembered that the whole spectacle was started by an oddball Frenchman with a dream in his heart. The earliest modern Olympics were lovable slow-motion disasters – let’s chuckle together, and dream of an Olympiad without terrible Chevy commercials or the sound of Bob Costas.

Episode 3: The Olympics

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS

“The King of Macedonia, it is said, was compelled to prove himself of pure Hellenic blood before he was allowed to compete at Olympia. The world is too big now for that sort of thing. ” – George Horton, “Revival of Olympian Games”, The North American Review, March 1896

Transcript

Bienvenue, and welcome back to The Land of Desire, a podcast about the weird, wacky and wonderful stories from French history. If you’re anything like me, you haven’t been able to tear your eyes away from Olympics. Three days in and approximately 97 hours of competitive swimming later, it occurred to me that if I don’t want to talk, think, or listen to anything that isn’t about the Olympics right now, you all probably feel the same way. When we left off last episode, we were discussing the defeat of the French Army by the mighty Prussians back in 1871. Well, what if I told you that the end of the Franco-Prussian War was directly responsible for our ability to watch Michael Phelps in a Speedo? What if I told you that an eccentric Frenchman in desperate need of a P.E. class is the one to thank for our international past-time of binge-eating junk food while cheering on the world’s fittest athletes? Every four years, the Summer Olympics return with their familiar joys and annoyances. The triumph of the underdog! Bob Costas narrating. Determination and grit overcoming injury and bad luck! Bob Costas narrating. Today, let’s take a trip down memory lane and come to understand how many of our traditional reactions to the Olympic Games are as old as the games themselves. I only hope you enjoy me more than Bob Costas.

—————-

France had never experienced anything like its own defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1871. The blow to national pride was immense, and it’s honestly difficult for a 21st century student to really understand the national depression which overtook the country. A period of soul-searching went on which would last for decades, and the next generation would spend their lives trying to fix their broken nation. One member of this generation was Baron Pierre De Coubertin. Born to an aristocratic, traditional family, Coubertin was an idealist and a progressive in many ways, but the family agreed on one thing: 19th century France was a mess. As Coubertin later wrote, “Three monarchies, two empires and three republics in less than a century…that was a lot.” France suffered its defeat by the Prussians when Pierre was only 8 years old. By the time he reached adulthood, Pierre had spent over a decade listening to France attempt to diagnose its sicknesses. It’s little wonder that he grew up anxious and restless: his parents expected him to go to a military academy. Pierre dropped out. To make it up to them, he enrolled in a law school. Two months later, Pierre dropped out. There were bigger questions on his mind: what had gone wrong in 1871? At the root, everyone was convinced, there was some kind of social decay, some kind of moral weakness. How could France build a nation which was morally strong? Well, some French thinkers figured, why not focus on raising a nation which is physically strong?

Here, at last, was a question deserving of Pierre Coubertin’s attention. Coubertin vowed, “I will recast the bodies and souls of today’s lonely, confined children through sport, through its risks and even its excesses.” Right from the start, Coubertin looked across the channel to England, where, as one French educational reformer noticed, “boys who learned to command in games were learning to command in the Indies.” Throughout English schools, children were encouraged to excel in sports, to compete and strive for physical excellence, and to participate in teams, working together to achieve goals. Young athletes were rewarded for their own efforts, not because of their fancy backgrounds. According to Coubertin, “here was the one recipe for national greatness to which over several centuries none of our governments had thought to direct its attention and efforts.” During the summer of 1890, Coubertin sailed to England to visit one peculiar athletic event in the obscure English village of Much Wenlock. The village organized an annual fair in which members of the town were encouraged to gather together to compete amongst one another in a variety of sports, all genders and all ages, not for any particularly dazzling prizes but simply for the thrill of the game and the honor of victory. The local schoolmaster had come up with the idea for the fair while studying ancient Greece, when local towns used to gather together to compete in an event called the Olympics. The idea hit Coubertin like a lightning bolt: what if it wasn’t just some ancient Greek towns or the village of Much Wedlock gathering together to compete and celebrate the joy of sports? What if it was the entire world? For the next 4 years, Coubertin was a man possessed by a single perfect idea: He was going to revive the ancient Olympic games.

Here’s the thing: for all the time we spend paying lip service to the first modern Olympics, held in Athens in 1896, the truth is…they just weren’t a big deal. It was generally Greek athletes playing games in front of other Greek spectators, joined by whoever happened to be in town at the time. Only 76 athletes came from somewhere besides Greece, and none of them were that great. The world’s greatest athletes had better things to do in 1896 than get on board a ship and sail for a month to a dusty country in the middle of political upheaval because some weird French dude is trying to revive a 2,000 year old track meet. If you can believe it, this poorly-advertised, weird little meetup didn’t get a lot of press attention. On the other hand, the press it did receive is going to sound veeeerrry familiar.

The first topic up for debate: is it worthwhile for a city to spend money hosting the Olympic games during troubled times? In the 1890s, Greece was bankrupt. Everybody was leaving, usually for the United States. The world’s first Olympic committee took a look at Coubertin’s estimated costs for the games and sent him a report saying, “Nope, it’s going to cost three times that amount. They also attached their resignations. Eventually, the funds were raised by a combination of public campaign drives, the sale of commemorative postage stamps, and, of course, corporate sponsorship.

My snarkiness aside, the 1896 Games were a success in their own way. They were certainly the largest international athletic competition ever organized at the time, and 80,000 spectators enjoyed the show. The Americans had a great time, and won 9 out of the 12 events. Needless to say, the Greek audiences weren’t happy, but two familiar Olympic tropes were about to emerge: the underdog and the hometown hero.

I don’t know what compels us as a human race to keep looking for more Olympic underdog stories every four years, because we pretty much nailed that one in our first time out of the gate. The anxious Greek audience was eager for a win, especially with their pride and joy event coming up: the marathon. As legend has it, back in 490 BC the Greeks defeated the Persians at the battlefield of Marathon, and someone needed to let the bigwigs in Athens know about it. This poor messenger, bless his heart, is said to have run the entire distance nonstop, bursting into the room to say, “We’ve won!” before collapsing and dying. Naturally, in 1896, someone said, “Yeah, let’s try that again!” What with the Americans’ dominance in the field and the historical nature of the race, Greece was absolutely determined that they should win this most prestigious event. Enter Spyridon Louis.

In the tiny Athenian suburb of Marousi, Spyridon Louis helped his father transport mineral water throughout the area. The family was poor, but at a time when Athens lacked any central water supply, the work they did was important. Nevertheless, Spyridon decided to take the day off and try his hand at the prestigious marathon event, and if you wanted to have an event full of amateur athletes, you don’t get much more amateur than Spyridon. And they REALLY wanted amateur athletes – one poor guy from Italy had walked to Athens on foot, over 1,000 miles, only to be told that his professional race-running experience was a disqualifier. By the time all 17 contestants assembled at the starting line, only a handful of the runners had ever run 26 miles in their lives. The favorites were an Australian accountant, a cocky American, and my personal favorite, Albin Lermusiaux, a Frenchman who insisted on wearing white gloves any time he might be competing in front of royalty. By Friday, April 10th, over 100,000 spectators had gathered in the stadium near the finish line. While the crowd slept in anticipation of the race, the athletes themselves were piled into the back of a wagon and dragged out to the town of Marathon where the traditional starting line was set up. Just after 2 PM, in front of a small group of very curious villagers, the race official gave a short speech and fired the starter pistol. They were off!

For the next 26.2 miles, the race followed curving, dusty dirt roads weaving in and out through bare lands and tiny country villages. I don’t know how Spyridon felt about his competition at the start of the race, but it didn’t take long for him to start feeling preeeeetty good about his chances. While the rest of the runners were huffing and puffing, at one point Spyridon pulled over to the side of the track, walked off the racecourse and into a bar. While the other racers surged ahead, Spyridon enjoyed an exceptionally confident glass of wine. Sure enough, as Spyridon was enjoying his me-time, the exhausted runner from France dropped out. I’m tempted to blame the white gloves, but if rumors were true, it’s possible Albin was hungover. The lone American had started losing it halfway through the race and wandered off the track. Finally, the Australian accountant stopped in his tracks, fell down, and barfed all over himself. Spyridon’s time had come. Back at the finish line, rumors that a Greek runner was in the lead led to huge cheers of anticipation. Fearing a riot, police escorts went to meet the runners and escort the leader – whoever he was – safely across the finish line. The crowd held their breath and waited, their country’s honor hanging in the balance. All of a sudden, as a roar went around the stadium, here came little Spyridon Louis in at the head of the pack! Greece…went insane. Not one but two princes ran down to the arena to run next to Spyridon for the final lap. After two hours, fifty eight minutes and fifty seconds, Spyridon lept across the finish line and into eternal glory. Hoisted onto the crowd’s shoulders, Spyridon was carried all the way to the King of Greece, who stood up to congratulate the winner. According to witnesses, the King asked this unexpected hero, this modest country bumpkin, what prize he wanted from the nation. If you can believe this – and listeners, in my heart of hearts I choose to believe this because it’s so perfect – the only thing Spyridon Louis, Champion of Greeece, Original Underdog and Hero of the People, wanted for his grand prize? A donkey cart to help his father haul that mineral water around town. Just like that, Spyridon Louis went out on top, driving his donkey cart back home, never competing in another race. Only once did he pop up back up during the Berlin games of 1936, Spyridon Louis returned as the Olympic flagbearer for Greece.

Coubertin couldn’t have asked for better. Here was the complete embodiment of his dream: a complete amateur, a total nobody, going toe to toe with the rest of the world, judged on nothing but his pure strength and discipline, rejecting all the material trappings except a modest gift for his family, inspiring the world with his moral strength and virtue. He knew an opportunity when he saw one, so while the world was fawning over its first Olympic hero, Coubertin was shoring up support for the sequel: a 2nd Olympics, set in Coubertin’s backyard: Paris. The problem was, back then the Olympics weren’t the biggest game in town.

In 1900, Paris hosted the Universal Exposition, one of those hard-to-describe-to-modern-day-listener events. Like the world’s biggest party, science fair, food court, museum and theater all rolled into one colossal extravaganza. Coubertin thought, what better way to draw international attention to the Olympics than by putting them on display for all the exposition’s visitors? After all, over 75 million visitors were expected to attend the Exposition, what better exposure, right?

…Right?

——————

As of this podcast, the Rio Olympics have been going on for less than one week. At this point, we all know someone who’s already tired of hearing about them and gets a nosebleed every time they hear the words “qualifying round”. Imagine this: an Olympic games which goes on for half a year. The schedules for everything kept getting changed at the last minute, groups wrestled to decide who was in charge of the whole thing, potential competitors rolled their eyes and dropped out of everything and, if you haven’t figured it out already, the 1900 Olympics – and the 1900 Universal Exposition – turned out to be a complete disaster.

First of all, it was insanely expensive. Remember how the 1896 games were financed by public fundraisers and corporate donations? No such luck this time – the Universal Exposition was all about ticket sales. Ticket prices managed to be low enough that all the organizers and participating booths went bankrupt, while remaining high enough that nobody could afford to attend, and only 50 million people – 2/3 the original estimate – were able to attend. So if you’re a very fancy person in 1900 who is able to afford a ticket to the Exposition, you’re probably wandering around a pretty desperate looking pavillion, with booth owners wiping sweat off their forehead while they figure out what they’re going to tell their bankers at the end of the year. After wandering past some beautiful vases in a new style called art nouveau, you might hear a noise from the next courtyard. What’s this? Ohh, how interesting, some kind of international sports demonstration. You may enjoy a boxing match, you may even cheer on athletes from around the world, but you definitely don’t recognize yourself attending some grand mystical international spectacle. In fact, you may not even recognize yourself participating in such a spectacle!

At one point during the Exposition, a young art student from Chicago named Margaret Ives Abbott arrived in Paris to begin studying art with Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin. She and her mother were taking in the sights and sounds of the Exposition one day, when they encountered a charming little golf match getting ready to begin. Wonderful! They loved golf! Margaret and her mother each grabbed a club and signed up. To their mild delight, Margaret came in first place, with her mother finishing in a very respectable seventh place. She received a nice porcelain bowl as a prize.

Margaret Ives Abbott died in 1955, at the age of 76, without anyone ever informing her that she was, in fact, America’s first female Olympic gold medalist.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a mess. I hope the other competitions were better organized!” Well, they may have been even worse. The croquet tournament was viewed by exactly one paying spectator. Seven French men and three French women competed. If you can believe it, France won. Similarly, the cricket tournament had only two teams: Great Britain, and the staff of France’s embassy to Great Britain. Great Britain won that one. The runners in that year’s marathon got lost in the forest, and spent half of the race dodging cars, bicyclists and animals. During the rowing competition, multiple teams switched out their teammates with local children, because they weighed less in the boats. To this day, they are considered to be the youngest Olympic athletes ever.

After half a year, the Exposition packed up its tents and everyone went to get drunk and look at their bank accounts. Coubertin himself later noted, “It’s a miracle that the Olympic Movement survived that celebration.” However, despite the chaos, poor planning, and budget excesses (does that sound familiar, anybody?) there were a few reasons to be proud of the 1900 Olympics.

On the one hand, the Universal Exposition only received 2/3 of the visitors it expected. On the other hand, 2/3 means fifty million people passed through the turnstiles. We don’t have any way of knowing how many of those visitors enjoyed the Olympics but we can safely assume it was more than the number of folks who happened to be in town during the 1896 games. Instead of the 262 athletes from 13 countries featured in 1896, the games of Paris featured 58,731 participants from 30 countries. As one attendant said at the time, the 1900 Olympics were “grandiose”. A journalist describing the games after their finale wrote, “Never has sport been so honored than this year, never has it gathered such a crowd.” In other words, as a logistical exercise, the 1900 Olympics were, as Coubertin put it, “humiliating.” But as an attempt to inspire the world’s imagination, as an effort to build a truly international community of athletes, the Olympics were on their way. By the time the Olympics returned to Paris 24 years later, the Games had finally achieved a status and glamour recognizable to modern day viewers like us.
—————————

By 1924, Baron Pierre de Coubertin was ready to retire. As a parting thank you to the man who had gotten the entire movement off the ground, the International Olympic Committee agreed to bring the Olympics back to his beloved home, Paris. This time, however, there would be no logistical nightmares, and no Universal Exposition to steal the spotlight. More importantly, the world was now deeply wounded by the Great World War, and Coubertin, ever the idealist, saw one last chance to encourage true international peace and fellowship through his beloved Games.

As over 3,000 athletes from 44 countries arrived in Paris, they were greeted by over 1,000 journalists. The Olympics were headline news, attracting interest from every corner of the globe. The games were taken seriously, not only by the athletes themselves, but also their home countries. Instead of having to explain to various employers and universities just why the heck they needed to take a month off to play tennis overseas, the 350 members of Team USA were sent to the Games in style, aboard a specially tricked out ocean liner named America, designed to allow athletes to continue training during the voyage. More importantly, countries were truly sending the best of their best – in track and field alone, 6 new world records were set during the game. As the athletes made their way into town, for the first time, a rudimentary Olympic village was available. The Games had a proper Opening and Closing ceremony, and more than 60,000 spectators packed the stands each day, not counting those who were able to listen from home during the first ever Olympic radio broadcast. Anybody who was anybody was paying attention to the Olympics – so, naturally, celebrities had a front row seat. Two of the biggest stars in Hollywood, the original Brangelina, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, even traveled as part of Team USA! Some of the most legendary moments in Olympic history took place in 1924. First, Johnny Weissmuller won 3 gold medals in swimming and set himself up for a lucrative Hollywood career playing Tarzan. Meanwhile, the British track and field team would later be immortalized in the movie Chariots of Fire. By the time the 1924 Olympics wrapped up, more than 600,000 fans from all around the world had traveled to Paris to take in the spectacle. Baron Pierre de Coubertin retired from the International Olympic Committee, confident that his beautiful dream of an international athletic community would outlive him.

Before I sign off so we can all go back to shoveling pizza into our mouths while watching 15,000 people who haven’t skipped a workout since middle school, here’s a little food for thought: the Olympic Games have never been perfect. Olympic villages are always a disaster – Team USA may have refused to stay in the Rio accommodations of 2016, but they also turned their nose up at the Paris accommodations of 1924! Athletes in uncommon sports struggle to pay the bills – right now, most of America’s greatest track and field stars earn less than $15,000 per year through sports. Spyridon Louis ran in shoes donated by his village. Everyone always predicts a complete disaster before the games open: we saw it in Rio this year, we heard the same story in Sochi, in London…stretching all the way back to 1924, when a massive flood in Paris wiped out half the Olympic grounds six months before the Opening Ceremony. Finally, every four years we’ll wring our hands over the costs of the game. Most cities lose money hosting the games. And yet: we keep coming back. We get excited despite ourselves. That anthem starts up, and despite everything, despite the expense and the political complications and God save us all, Bob Costas, we watch. The Olympics are part of a old conversation, and raise questions the world hasn’t managed to answer in over 100 years. But I’m a softie, and I still believe deep down that the Olympics have beautiful things to teach us about endurance, and cooperation, and surpassing stereotypes and expectations. Before you turn back to the television, remember the dream of Baron Coubertin: “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in Life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well. To spread these principles is to build up a strong and more valiant and, above all, more scrupulous and more generous humanity.

Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. If you want to see photographs and memorabilia from the early Olympic Games, check out this week’s blog post at www.thelandofdesire.com Join me again in two weeks for a new episode, and in the meantime, you can subscribe to this show on iTunes, Stitcher, and the Google Play store. The Land of Desire is written, researched and produced by Diana Stegall – that’s me! – so if you have a moment, please rate and review this show on iTunes, I promise I really appreciate it! That’s all for the next two weeks, so until then…au revoir!

“Red wine: the original performance enhancing drug”

Further Reading:

I haven’t had a chance to pick it up as it only came out a few weeks ago, but I’m excited to read David Goldblatt’s The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. Read an interview with the author in National Geographic.

World War I, French athletic associations and the 1924 Olympic Games: The Lost Generation and Olympian Man (David Bevan, Dalhousie French Studies, 1984)

Too distracted by the Olympics for heavy reading? Here’s a listicle for you.

What’s next for Katie Ledecky? Maybe trying to break this swimming record set at the 1924 Olympics.

Here’s something which is NOT required reading: the English edition of Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s tome on France in the Third Republic. An excerpt from an incredible contemporary review in the Political Science Quarterly that I couldn’t keep to myself:

The book is brilliantly written and abominably translated. The only praise to be given to the translator is that he (or she) has been modest enough to withhold his (or her) name from the public. But when will authors and publishers understand that a good translator must possess four qualifications – first a knowledge of the language to be translated from; second, a knowledge of the language to be translated into; third, literary ability; fourth, knowledge of the subject dealt with in the book to be translated? M. de Coubertin’s translator possesses all the above qualifications save four.

Sources:

Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of Organised Sport in France (Eugen Weber, Journal of Contemporary History, 1970)

Gymnastics and Sports in Fin-de-Siècle France: Opium of the Classes? (Eugen Weber, The American Historical Review, February 1971)

Degeneration, Neurasthenia and the Culture of Sport in Belle Epoque France (Robert A. Nye, Journal of Contemporary History, January 1982)

Revival of Olympian Games (George Horton, The North American Review, March 1896)

The Modern Olympic Games and Their Model in Antiquity (Louis Callebat, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Spring 1998)

Douglas Fairbanks and the Birth of Hollywood’s Love Affair with the Olympics (Rusty Wilson, International Symposium for Olympic Research, LA 84 Foundation, 2006)

What Price Victory? The World of International Sports and Politics (Andrew Strenk, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 1979)

Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement (John E. Findling & Kimberly D. Pelle, 2004)

Pierre de Coubertin’s Ideology of Olympism from the Perspective of the History of Ideas (Sigmund Loland, International Symposium for Olympic Research, Centre for Olympic Studies, 1994)