II Olympiad: Paris 1900

By Carl Posey

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement, hoped to cement the future of the Games with a triumphant celebration of the second Olympiad in his native Paris in 1900. The II Olympiad-Paris 1900, the third volume in The Olympic Century series, tells the story of a fledgling movement caught up in the whirlwind of the greatest city of the age at the height of the Belle Epoch.

The backdrop for the book is the decadent Paris of the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergeres, the art of Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Gauguin, and the revolutionary “Metro” with its now iconic Art Nouveau architecture. The Games would be contested over five months and subsumed into the 1900 Exposition Universelle, a concurrent celebration of art, culture and technology. Alongside typical events like athletics, gymnastics and swimming, The II Olympiad explores unlikely events like auto racing, ballooning and croquet that characterized the Paris Games.

In the wake of the confusion of Paris, the focus of the book shifts to the war for control that would threaten the very survival of the Games. But while the fate of the Games was in doubt, an enterprising Swedish sportsman named Viktor Gustav Balck created an event that would have long-term implications for the Olympic movement. The book concludes with a detailed look at Balck’s Nordic Games, first staged in Stockholm in 1901, and draws a direct line to the ultimate creation of the Winter Olympics, first celebrated in Chamonix, France in 1924.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, former President of the International Olympic Committee, called The Olympic Century, “The most comprehensive history of the Olympic games ever published”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warwick Press Inc.
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781987944020

Book preview

THE OLYMPIC CENTURY

THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT

VOLUME 3

THE

II OLYMPIAD

PARIS 1900

THE NORDIC GAMES

by Carl Posey

W

Warwick Press Inc.

Toronto

Copyright © 1996 WSRP

The Olympic Century series was produced as a joint effort among the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and World Sport Research & Publications, to provide an official continuity series that will serve as a permanent on-line Olympic education program for individuals, schools, and public libraries.

Published by:

Warwick Press Inc., Toronto

www.olympicbooks.com

1st Century Project: Charles Gary Allison

Publishers: Robert G. Rossi, Jim Williamson, Rona Wooley

Editors: Christian D. Kinney, Laura Forman

Art Director: Christopher M. Register

Picture Editors: Lisa Bruno, Debora Lemmons

Digital Imaging: Richard P. Majeske

Associate Editor, Research: Mark Brewin

Associate Editor, Appendix: Elsa Ramirez

Designers: Kimberley Davison, Diane Myers, Chris Conlee

Staff Researchers: Brad Haynes, Alexandra Hesse, Pauline Ploquin

Copy Editor: Harry Endrulat

Venue Map Artist: Dave Hader, Studio Conceptions, Toronto

Fact Verification: Carl and Liselott Diem Archives of the German Sport University at Cologne, Germany

Statistics: Bill Mallon, Walter Teutenberg

Memorabilia Consultants: Manfred Bergman, James D. Greensfelder, John P. Kelly, James B. Lally, Ingrid O’Neil

Office Staff: Diana Fakiola, Brian M. Heath, Edward J. Messier, Brian P. Rand, Robert S. Vassallo, Chris Waters

Senior Consultant: Dr. Dietrich Quanz (Germany)

Special Consultants: Walter Borgers, Dr. Karl Lennartz, Dr. Dietrich Quanz, Dr. Norbert Mueller (Germany), Ian Buchanan (United Kingdom), Wolf Lyberg (Sweden), Dr. Nicholas Yalouris (Greece).

International Contributors: Jean Durry (France), Dr. Fernand Landry (Canada), Dr. Antonio Lombardo (Italy), Dr. John A. MacAloon (U.S.A.), Dr. Jujiro Narita (Japan), C. Robert Paul (U.S.A.), Dr. Roland Renson (Belgium), Anthony Th. Bijkirk (Netherlands), Dr. James Walston (Ombudsman)

International Research and Assistance: John S. Baick (New York), Matthieu Brocart (Paris), Alexander Fakiolas (Athens), Bob Miyakawa (Tokyo), Rona Lester (London), Dominic LoTempio (Columbia), George Kostas Mazareas (Boston), Georgia McDonald (Colorado Springs), Wendy Nolan (Princeton), Alexander Ratner (Moscow), Jon Simon (Washington, D.C.), Frank Strasser (Cologne), Valéry Turco (Lausanne), Laura Walden (Rome), Jorge Zocchi (Mexico City)

All rights reserved. No part of The Olympic Century book series may be copied, republished, stored in a retrieval system, or otherwise reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior written consent of the IOC, the USOC, and WSRP.

eBook Conversion: eBook Partnership, United Kingdom

ISBN (24 Volume Series) 978-1-987944-24-2

ISBN (Volume 3) 978-1-987944-02-0

CONTENTS

I

The Belle Epoque

II

Boys in the Bois

III

An Unsinkable Ideal

IV

Northern Light

Appendix

Magazines

Photo Credits

Bibliography

Index

THE BELLE EPOQUE

PARIS 1900

Had Margaret Dunne been asked to list the greatest moments in her golf career, this early mistress of the short game would almost certainly have cited her best days at the Chicago Golf Club, or at the National, next to Long Island’s Peconic Bay, or recalled any number of shots that she sent low and fast across the grassy sea of troubles that was St. Andrews, or the Royal St. George. Then there was the time in October 1900 when she’d won the women’s championship of France at Dinard, on the Bretagne coast, when she was 22. She always thought she won at Dinard because the French contestants, for reasons never revealed, had arrived to play in high heels and tight skirts, no match for her more flexible attire.

And then she might have remembered another match held a couple of weeks earlier. That had been an international event played on the superb links offered by the Société de Sport de Compiègne, about 50 miles (80.47 kilometers) northeast of Paris. But, of course, that had only been for a city title, not for all of France. Margaret Dunne died in June 1955, a pretty fine amateur golfer until sidelined by arthritis in her 60s, unaware that the match in Paris had made sporting history.

She’d been born Margaret Ives Abbott in the Indian city of Calcutta in June 1878, the daughter of Charles P. Abbott, an importer from Massachusetts, and his wife, Mary. According to family legend, at least, the Abbott’s Indian friends showered them with gifts but retrieved them when the baby turned out to be a girl. Had they known what a girl she would be, they might have reconsidered.

Widowed young, Mary returned to Boston with Margaret, then moved to Chicago, where she was literary editor at the Tribune and Times Herald, moving in the circles frequented by such literary luminaries as Mark Twain and Finley Peter Dunne, the freshly popular creator of a drolly philosophical Irishman named Mr. Dooley. She also wrote two of her three novels there. Margaret meanwhile grew up into the sort of willowy, confident youngwoman the Abbott’s friend Charles Dana Gibson liked to sketch, becoming the object of one of his works in 1903.

At the turn of the 20th century, golf was a royal sport of long standing in Europe but relatively new and not entirely respectable in America. Mr. Dooley, whose author was himself a determined duffer, allowed that golf was Scotland’s finest export "with the’ exciption maybe iv th’ theery iv infant damnation." In 1888, two Scots, John Reid and Robert Lockhart, had organized the St. Andrews Golf Club in Yonkers, New York. The sport had then spread westward to Chicago largely through the efforts of Charles Blair Macdonald, a Scottish aristocrat of larger-than-life proportions.

With six sets of clubs ordered from a friend in Liverpool, he established the Chicago Golf Club at Onwentsia in 1892. By 1896, golf had so captured the fancies of well-to-do Chicagoans that the original club engaged in ferocious competitions with its newer rival at Wheaton—contests so closely followed that those favoring the blue and yellow livery of Onwentsia and those in Wheaton’s red and white ceased speaking to one another. By 1900, however, 22 golf clubs had sprung up within 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) of downtown Chicago, and such ardor had begun to cool.

Mary Abbott joined the Chicago club because she was a friend of Charles Macdonald. Margaret joined in 1897 and stayed on because she discovered a passion—and a talent—for the game. At 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 meters), she was tall for her time, and gifted with what observers called a classy backswing that could power a ball on a low trajectory toward its target well down the fairway. In most tournaments, she could get around nine holes in under 60 strokes—unimpressive in the modern age of titanium and graphite clubs, but quite respectable given the technology and techniques at the time.

Below: A portrait of unintentional Olympian Margaret Abbott by artist Charles Dana Gibson from 1903 shows Abbott in the well-bred American style of the late-Victorian era. The female subjects of Gibson’s widely circulated sketches are often tall, poised and feminine, yet exude a touch of mischievousness. The look became an American archetype known as the Gibson Girl.

Neither Mary nor Margaret was what one would call an Edith-Wharton girl, or a John-Singer-Sargent one either. But they had money enough to see the world and follow their creative spirits. In 1899, they packed up and sailed to Paris, driven perhaps by the Francophilia endemic among upper-crust Chicagoans. Mary planned to write a third novel with the working title of A Woman in Paris. Margaret, a painter and etcher of ability, studied art with Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin—it was the electric age when they and Claude Monet and Pierre Renoir and many others were discovering their impressionist voices. Margaret also found herself often in the company of one of her mother’s good friends, Finley Peter Dunne, whom she would marry in 1902.

But the Paris sojourn was never intended to be all work and no play for this athletic pair. When they learned that, as part of the city’s Exposition Universelle, an international golf tournament was to be played at Compiègne, they jumped at the chance to enter, despite having played little since leaving Chicago.

Accordingly, on Wednesday morning, October 3, 1900, the Abbotts, mother and daughter, joined eight other women golfers on the links of the Société de Sport de Compiègne. By noon, the morning’s curtain of rain had been drawn back to reveal a warm autumn sun, and the ladies set out to play their nine, trailed by a large, noisy crowd interested in le golf. Noting the size and rowdiness of the gallery, Count Jacque de Pourtalés, a member of the Paris Golf Club and a steward of the tournament, was moved to exclaim, Why, it’s as bad as St. Andrews! Such distractions seemed not to faze Margaret Abbott. The chief feature of Miss Abbott’s play, reported the Paris-based New York Herald, is her driving and brassie play, her style being perfect. Her tall, supple figure allows her to bring her club on to the ball with a beautiful free body swing, and it rarely happens that she makes a bad stroke. Her short game, and particularly her approaches, would be much better with a little practice. Her success is all the more gratifying after such a long pause from regular play, and her victory is very popular in Paris, where she is a great favorite in American society.

The French capital’s new women’s champion had played the nine holes of the tournament in 47 strokes, just ahead of the 49 posted by runner-up Polly Whittier of Boston, who’d practiced that summer at St. Moritz, and third-place Daria Huger-Platt, of Dinard, who scored a 53. Mary Abbott finished seventh in the 10-woman field, with a 65.

That evening, the winners collected their prizes. Margaret Abbott and Polly Whittier each received a valuable objet d’art for their first and second places, and there were besides according to the Herald, five medals of a most beautiful and unique design for the five best scores. But one medal earned by Margaret Abbott on that October afternoon in 1900 wasn’t available to be awarded, or even mentioned at the ceremony, as it had not been minted yet on account of poor planning. That was the Olympic gold medal for the women’s golf competition. Without knowing she was competing for it, Margaret Abbot had become the first American woman ever to strike Olympic gold.

Below: Two women prepare to putt in the nine-hole golf tournament held in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle. The course would not be considered very challenging by today’s standards. The longest hole was roughly 213 yards (195 meters); the shortest nearly 65 yards (59 meters).

Such details must have been easy to overlook in those days, in that febrile city. Indeed, scholars have spent much of the century hotly debating whether the athletic events of the Exposition Universelle, as France’s 1900 extravaganza of science, culture, and sport was officially known—and the tournament from which Margaret Abbotts’ triumph became a nearly invisible detail—were considered Olympic at the time, or retrospectively rendered Olympic by revisionist historians yearning for quadrennial continuity. It is one of those arguments in which everyone is both right and wrong—like Paris itself in that epochal year.

The city to which the Abbotts, mother and daughter, had made their 1899 pilgrimage was enjoying what Charles Dickens had described, referring to the revolution 100 years before, as the best and worst of times. France still licked wounds inflicted a generation earlier. In 1870, an ill-advised thrust against Prussia by an ailing Napoleon III brought war with a newly unified Germany and inevitable defeat, although not before Paris had endured a long siege. That had been followed immediately by the insurrection of the city’s republicans, who, fearing a return to monarchy, established the Paris Commune, which attempted to bring back the bad old days of 1793.

Below: A busy street in Montmartre typifies life in turn-of-the-century Paris. Montmartre was then, as it is today, the center of the city’s artistic and bohemian community.

After only two months, the Commune had been brutally suppressed by troops during what became known as the week of blood, with many thousands killed and many more imprisoned or sent into exile. Thereafter, Parisians seemed always to be grieving over the 1870 war, which had cost France the rich mines and fields of Alsace and Lorraine, or the thousands of lost rebels of the doomed Commune. The Third Republic, which followed the collapse of Napoleon Ill’s Second Empire, sputtered along, providing universal suffrage as a buffer against the Gallic reflex toward rebellion.

To the astonishment of many foreign observers, the Third Republic held. Although it had forfeited some authority in this process—a good deal of the government’s power had been dispersed among the provinces—Paris became once again the capital of a republican France and also its heart, which beat with a confident thump of culture and commerce and possibility. Electricity had transformed Paris into a true city of light, and much of the political energy that had powered revolutions was diverted into such innocent alternatives as mammoth expositions and great works. The Basilique du Sacré Coeur rose on the heights of Montmartre, where the Commune had made its futile stand. Beneath the artful radiations of splendid monuments and tree-lined boulevards created decades earlier by the architect of Paris, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, a new underground railway—the Metropolitian—took form.

Music and dance played on the Parisian air, in the cafes and night clubs and concert halls. The city crackled with intellectual as well as physical electricity, under a soft humidity of decadence. Everything went. There were opiates and exotic liqueurs, girls and boys, and bizarre behavior as a kind of extreme sport; differences among men were settled with pistol and foil. For everyone, male and female, rich and poor, native or stranger, Paris at the turn of the 20th century was the playpen of the western world.

In counterpoint, this robust heart of France fibrillated with a buzz of imminent political collapse, with rumors of war impending against France’s perennial enemies to the east and west, of rampant crime, anarchy, scandal, restive labor, and the occasional detonations of such doomed speculative bubbles as the French attempt to cut a canal across Panama. Civil war seemed to be in the blood, like an incurable virus, always threatening to produce a new epidemic of violence. In the 1920s, people would look back across the decades—across time and the scattered bones of millions of young men—and remember this era as la Belle Époque, the beautiful age. But at the time, as the dawn of a new century was discerned, the French preferred Fin de Siècle, or end of the century, to celebrate the fact that an exhausting century was finally coming to an end.

Below: A propaganda photo portraying events from May 26, 1871, shows a vigilante mob of soldiers and civilians preparing to execute a line of radicals in league with the anti-government forces of the Commune. Two days earlier members of the Commune had assassinated the archbishop of Paris.

The embodiment of such complicated troubles was L’Affaire Dreyfus, which polarized Paris society for a decade and more, and which illuminated all that was good, and all that was rotten, in the state of France. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of selling secrets, stolen from his post in the War Ministry, to the German military attaché. The evidence against him mainly comprised of notes said to be in his hand, discovered by one Major Hubert Joseph Henry, and damning testimony by a Major Esterhazy.

But those were not the only cards stacked against Dreyfus. He was the son of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer in Alsace, which galvanized a potent anti-Semitic sentiment latent in Third Republic France. Not only was the manaccused of selling military secrets to the enemy, but also of being the agent of the immortal and hugely destructive fantasy of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Arrested on October 15, 1894, four days before his 3 5th birthday, Dreyfus was convicted of treason on December 22, 1894, and consigned to Devil’s Island, the notorious penal colony in French Guiana, for life.

His conviction marked the beginning, not the end, of Vaffaire. Further examination of the evidence suggested that Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, had been the author of the incriminating notes, and Henry was suspected of forging others. As Dreyfus’s guilt became less certain, France polarized into Dreyfusards, who sought the captain’s retrial and exoneration, and anti-Dreyfusards, who opposed reopening the case, seeing it as a matter of national security.

Below: French captain Alfred Dreyfus stands (on floor) to face a military court in Rennes, France, in 1899 to defend himself against accusations that he was a spy and traitor. Defenders of Dreyfus, who was Jewish, claimed that the charges were not the result of any misdeeds by the captain, but by anti-Semitism in the French armed forces.

On January 13, 1898, the novelist Emile Zola ran his famous open letter, slugged J’Accuse, I Accuse, on the front page of Aurore, a pro-Dreyfus newspaper. Zola was convicted of libel, fined, and sentenced to a year in prison. But his article had ignited a fuse no one could dampen. That August, Hubert Joseph Henry killed himself, leaving a confession of his crime against Dreyfus. Esterhazy bolted for Belgium and eventually England.

A year later, Dreyfus was brought before a second court martial and again convicted of treason. The French president, however, issued a pardon, which Dreyfus accepted on condition he could still try to prove his innocence. It would take another five years for him to secure a third trial, and two more years for his good name to be cleared and for him to be restored to the army, in which he would fight during World War I.

Thus, as the two Abbott women arrived in Paris, France was still not quite over the Dreyfus affair, or its national flirtation with virulent anti-Semitism. It was only just learning how thoroughly it had besmirched itself in its defaming Dreyfus and just beginning to wonder whether that terrible taste in the national mouth would ever go away.

Below: The Moorish Dance, an 1895 pastel by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, depicts the Paris cabaret society that had sprung up in late-Victorian Paris. The evening’s audience, an assemblage of Parisian luminaries, includes the painter himself (second from right). A French Postimpressionist, Toulouse-Lautrec was a prolific artist whose many creations present a colorful depiction of the bohemian life of the belle epoch.

To many, the obvious antidote for this hangover was a national commitment to sports. A healthy body would cast off the infamous decadence afflicting French youth, like sunlight erasing patches of mildew. For some, there was a further subtext: If France was to restore itself to world prominence, it must send young men to battle from the playing fields, not the bars and dance halls of Montmartre.

Three years after the dispiriting defeat of 1871, the Club Alpin Français was established to provide a school of physical energy and moral vigor, so that the young men of France would be more virile, more apt to bear military life, more prepared to face a long conflict without losing heart. The sudden taste for mountaineering proved hard to quench and soon there was the Société des Marcheurs Touristes de France, which not only encouraged hiking and climbing, but in time of war might offer excellent guides for our armies.

Shooting clubs sprang up, along with gymnastic associations, the former devoted to turning young Frenchmen into crack shots, the latter to restore to the French their muscles. Many bore names that echoed their patriotic motivation: La Vaillante, The Valiant, and Patriotes Bordelais, Border Patriots. As time passed, however, and France’s "patriotic grief began to lift, such clubs became more social than militaristic, their members concerned not with fighting the hated Germans but with shedding a few kilograms, forming favorable business connections, and taking a midday shower—in short, they became much like the athletic spas of today. They were, one might say, reflections of, not cures for, fin