Victorian Britons codified the modern versions of most sports but didn’t see the point of playing them against foreigners. That’s why most international sports competitions were invented in Paris. Many of these contests — including the modern Olympics, which return to the city next month — were invented here during France’s Belle Époque, around 1900. Several of Paris’s Olympic sites have their own fascinating histories, while the new Aquatics Centre is a model sports venue for the green era. It all calls for a sporting tour of Paris.
The first leg of the journey will take us to various spots inside the city itself — all of them easily covered by bike or metro. We’ll then travel five minutes north by RER suburban train to Seine-Saint-Denis, the disadvantaged département that will be the heart of the Games. The longer trip to Versailles is only for the keenest.
Birthplace of the modern Olympics
We’ll start in the Grand Amphithéâtre of Sorbonne University, where in June 1894 a small Parisian with a big moustache, Pierre de Frédy, also known as Baron de Coubertin, appealed to 2,000 delegates from around the world to support a revival of the ancient Olympics. “It is given to us,” the 31-year-old explained to them, in the then universal language of French, “to meet in this great city of Paris, whose rejoicings and anxieties are shared by the world, so that one could call her its nervous centre.”
Having sat in that magnificent auditorium and struggled with its acoustics, I wonder how many of them heard him. Still, his claim, at that time, was a platitude. Of course the delegates were meeting in the Navel of the World. Of course they were listening to a Frenchman who was trying to civilise them. The delegates voted for Coubertin’s proposal, as he later wrote, “chiefly to please me”. Website; Directions
Birthplace of the Tour de France
Twenty minutes north by bike or taxi from the Sorbonne (or 30 minutes by metro) is the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre. Here, one November lunchtime in 1902, in a now-vanished brasserie called Zimmer, a reporter on L’Auto newspaper suggested to the editor that they invent a cycling race around France. The editor gave a time-honoured Parisian response: “For me, it’s a no.” The newspaper’s financier created the Tour de France anyway. Directions
Birthplace of Fifa and football’s World Cup
Cycle south-west to 229 Rue Sainte-Honoré. In an office on the courtyard here in May 1904, seven men, including the French grocer’s son Jules Rimet, founded the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, Fifa. Rimet would later become its president and create football’s World Cup. Directions
Birthplace of motor sports
From the Rue Saint-Honoré, walk ten minutes south-west to Place de la Concorde, an Olympic venue this summer for the “urban” sports of BMX freestyle, skateboarding, breakdancing and three-on-three basketball. At Concorde, find the mansion flying the flag of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). A month after Rimet et al founded Fifa, posh automobile enthusiasts set up the FIA here and began writing the international rules for motor-racing. Directions
Then it’s on to the most noteworthy Olympic venues, starting with the main Olympic stadium (below), in Seine-Saint-Denis, five minutes north of Paris by suburban RER train from Gare du Nord station.
Stade de France
This national stadium was built for the football World Cup of 1998. Its most famous night remains France’s 3-0 victory over Brazil in that year’s final, with Zinedine Zidane heading two goals. The Stade was built with an athletics track, with a view of one day serving as an Olympic stadium. That moment will finally come when it hosts the rugby, athletics, Para athletics and the closing ceremony.
An office district arose around it. The plan was to regenerate impoverished Seine-Saint-Denis. But today, the concrete stadium beside the A1 motorway, with only soulless office towers for neighbours, looks like a traffic island in a 1990s dystopia. The Stade hasn’t regenerated Seine-Saint-Denis. The department remains the poorest in mainland France. Website; Directions
Aquatics Centre
The Stade de France is now being put to shame by a much smaller, tent-like structure that just opened across the motorway, connected by a footbridge: the Aquatics Centre, the only permanent sports facility built specifically for these Games. Its dipping roof, designed to reduce the distance from the top of the stands to the pool, is a wink to its bigger neighbour’s. Here is a state of the art 2020s building facing a state of the art 1990s one.
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