Paris, je t'aime
France gave us the modern Games and now the City of Love is preparing the most romantic stage of all. It’s time to lose your heart to the Olympics…
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- Simon Barnes
The French see themselves as practical, clear-sighted and, above all, logical people. So different from that lot on the other side of la Manche with their obsession with their royal family and imperial past. But the Olympic Games are before us – and they wouldn’t exist without the ineluctable romanticism of the French.
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The beach volleyball will be held beneath the Eiffel Tower, built from 1887–9 as a symbol of French romantic feelings about modernism. The parade of athletes that opens the Games will take place not in a stadium, but along six kilometres of the River Seine, concluding opposite the Trocadéro, an expression of the notion that the Olympics are for everyone. Vive la liberté!
There will be sporting events held all over the city that was rebuilt by Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the 19th century, with its wide boulevards, squares, fountains and parks combining radical thinking with romantic aspirations.
The modern Olympic Games was the dream of another romantic Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The French are entitled to claim that Paris is the natural home of the Olympics, and for the next 17 days it would be ill-mannered not to agree.
De Coubertin had one of the great moustaches of history. He also had deeply romantic notions about ancient Greece, along with equally romantic notions about British education. He especially admired the way that sport was part of the curriculum at British public schools and venerated the headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold, who was never as keen on sport as De Coubertin believed. It has been suggested that De Coubertin got most of his ideas about sport and the British from Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s School Days, which is set at Rugby.
The baron was an idealist who put his ideals into practice. He took the ancient Greek festival of sporting excellence called the Olympic Games and combined it with the British vision of the noble sportsman. The first Olympic Games of the modern era took place in Athens in 1896, to make clear the continuity with the past. But in 1900 the Games went to Paris. The 20th century was here and the Olympics as we know them today were up and running.
Paris hosted the Games again in 1924, as memorably depicted in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. “L’important dans la vie ce n’est point le triomphe, mais le combat,” De Coubertin famously said: “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle.” I’m not convinced that Harold Abrahams, gold medal winner in real life and the film’s hero, played by Ben Cross, saw it quite like that.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, pictured in 1896, gave the world the modern Olympic Games. Getty
I spoke to Victor le Masne, composer of the official Olympic theme for this year’s Paris Games. He told me he was trying to express “the many emotions you have when you watch sport, the amazing journeys of the athletes, win or lose. What is happening in your head, to express all those emotions in one piece, is not an easy task.”
International sport is largely a French idea. Jules Rimet was involved in the founding of an organisation called the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, these days more widely known as Fifa. He was the governing body’s third president, serving for a record 33 years, and he thought it would be nice to have a world championship. The first football World Cup was held in 1930; the art deco trophy was named in his honour. Many international sports organisations have or had a French name, having been founded by the French. Swimming is run by what was originally the Fédération Internationale de Natation, or Fina, now groovily rebranded as World Aquatics. Horsey events are run by the Fédération Équestre Internationale, and fencing by the Fédération Internationale d’Escrime.
For De Coubertin, all this was still not quite heroic enough, so he invented a discipline designed to make sport even more glorious. This new event was supposed to combine all the attributes of the perfect soldier: he must ride a horse, shoot, fence, swim and run. Perhaps De Coubertin should have kept his nerve and made writing an ode to your mistress the ultimate decider of gold.
It will be the most spectacular Opening Ceremony in history
The new sport was the modern pentathlon and they keep messing about with it. They even tried to get rid of it for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. But when it came to it, no one had the heart to say goodbye. We are all romantic about sport, or we wouldn’t watch it. Perhaps we got that from the French – or perhaps it’s a universal emotion that the French spelt out for us.
Paris will be the second city after London to hold the Games three times. A century has gone by since the Chariots of Fire Games, which had 3,089 athletes taking part in 17 sports. It was the first Games to have an Olympic village and the first to be covered by live radio. This summer’s Games will see more than 10,500 athletes taking part in 329 events across 32 sports, including the new one of breaking (as in breakdancing), which has doubtless been introduced by people who are romantic about the future. There will be broadcasters covering the action from some 160 nations and territories.
But the organisers of the Paris Games certainly haven’t created a brave new world of specially created buildings. This Games is all about sustainability: athletics at the old Stade de France, tennis at the Stade Roland-Garros, football at Parc des Princes, along with temporary facilities, for example for skateboarding, at the Place de la Concorde. There are only two new builds.
An artist's impression of the Stade de France with its athletics track. Allstar
And the Opening Ceremony will take place all over the city, available for everyone to watch, many of them on the quays for free. “It is a crazy idea,” says le Masne. “It is a beautiful idea. Paris will be the landscape.” And the music will be his: “If it is a success, the perception of people everywhere in the world will be good. The French have reinvented the structure of the classical Opening Ceremony and placed it in the beautiful city. It will be hard to be bored!”
The athletes will travel by boat from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Pont d’Iéna in what the organisers promise will be “the most spectacular and accessible Opening Ceremony in Olympic history”. But really, never mind all that. It’s the sport that counts. What we will remember about what they’re already calling “the people’s Olympics” will be the stuff the athletes do. De Coubertin was no doubt right when he said that the most important thing in the Olympics is not winning but competing, though I suspect that when we look back on the 2024 Games, we will mostly remember the winners. We might also disagree with his idea that sport creates character, preferring to relish the action for the way it reveals character.
But I’m sure we will all agree on one thing: that the truth lies in the action. Allez!
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Coverage of the Olympic Games' Opening Ceremony begins on Friday at 5.45pm on BBC1 and 4.30pm on Eurosport.
Authors
Simon BarnesAuthor and journalist
Simon Barnes is a sports and wildlife writer, and is the author of a number of books including the recently published The Green Planet
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