The 2024 Paris Olympics signal a homecoming for the modern Games, but you’d be forgiven for not realising. Set up in the 1890s, the Olympics have Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin to thank for their modern iteration, who was inspired by ancient Greek ideals of amateur athleticism to revive the Games.
Accordingly, the Games were open only to amateur athletes, with anyone who had ever been paid to play sports disqualified from entry. Team USA pentathlete Jim Thorpe, who became the first Native American to win gold at the Olympics in 1912, had his medals taken back after it was discovered he had been paid a moderate sum for playing semi-professional baseball while in college. It was only in 1988 that the Games opened itself to professionals.
The Olympics also originally included five arts categories, with Coubertin himself winning a gold medal in poetry for “Ode to Sport” in 1912. Medals in literature, music, painting, sculpture and architecture (including a category for town planning) were all available until 1954.
So why the lack of fanfare for the Parisian father of the modern Olympic Games? His thoughts on gender and race might have something to do with it. A self-confessed “fanatical colonialist”, Coubertin wrote how sport and colonialism were “natural companions” and credited sport as an effective instrument for disciplining French subjects in the colonial empire.
And he was similarly forthright when it came to the Women’s World Games, lambasting them as “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and we are not afraid to add: incorrect, such would be in our opinion of this female half-Olympiad”. Despite this, female athletes were allowed to compete from 1990, though it wasn’t until 2012 when women competed in every sport.