The pedestrian is meditating on a wooden bench in the old stands of the Jacques Anquetil Velodrome, among the trees of the Bois de Vincennes. There is only him and a cyclist who is obsessively circling the concrete track.
These stands and this track have history. The opening ceremony of the Olympic Stadium was held here in 1900. International Competition of Physical Exercises and Sports: this was the official name of the Games. In 1924, Paris once again hosted the Olympic Games, and the municipal velodrome in Vincennes was once again an Olympic venue.
“It’s legendary,” says the cyclist, whose name is Jean-Pierre Guinebert, he is 66 years old and claims to be able to reach 74 kilometres per hour. “Sometimes, when I sit down for a few minutes, I imagine what it was like. There was not a pin to drop.”
In search of the remains of the old Paris Games, the pedestrian spent five hours today walking up and down the city and its surroundings. From west to east and from north to south. By metro, by commuter train, by bus, by tram, on foot. The result is meager. It is not easy to find remains. And there is a reason. Neither in 1900 nor in 1924 was the city of Paris reluctant to host the Olympic Games and expelled them to its outskirts. To places like the Vincennes velodrome, to the east of the capital. Or, in 1924, to the Colombes stadium, to the west.
“The Games did not leave much of a mark, because Paris was against the Games,” says historian Éric Monnin, vice-president of the University of Franche-Comté and director of the Centre for Olympic Studies and Research. And what about today? “Very little,” he replies. “On the other hand, there is an intangible legacy, a legacy that makes society evolve.”
First stage of the tour between the ruins from 1900 and 1924: Colombes, the Olympic stadium of 1924. Decades later, Pelé and Yashine would play here, and the Colombes Monsterwhich is how Barcelona player Estanislau Basora was nicknamed after a stellar performance in a friendly France-Spain in the fifties. Today the Yves du Manoir stadium hosts the field hockey competition and this Thursday the poster was hung sold out. The Olympic fervour reaches this point suburb.
Second stage: the Georges Vallerey swimming pool. Here, in 1924, a certain Johnny Weissmuller, son of a family of immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Banat, a gifted swimmer and future Tarzan, triumphed. In this pool, which in 2024 will be a training facility, he beat his rival and friend, the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku.
Between races, he “played his ukulele,” explains writer David O. Stewart in a text that reconstructs that rivalry. Weissmuller participated in a Show aquatic with comedians. “He embodied,” according to Stewart, “a new generation that radiated the energy, the carefreeness and the power of the Roaring Twenties.”
The happiness was not to last. The last stage is a void, the one occupied by the Winter Velodrome. This one, in the centre of Paris, next to the Eiffel Tower. Monnin explains that in 1924 it hosted fencing, Greco-Roman wrestling, wrestling, weightlifting and weight lifting. happy twenty…
In July 1942, French police in occupied Paris rounded up thousands of Jews and imprisoned them in the Velodrome d’Hiver before deporting and murdering them at Auschwitz. The place and the name became forever associated with the barbarity of the Nazis and their French collaborators.
Nothing remains of the velodrome. In its place are modern buildings. And, these days, thousands of Olympic tourists. The commemorative plaque goes unnoticed by the thousands of Olympic tourists who walk through these streets day and night. The message on the plaque exhorts whoever reads it: “Passenger, remember.”
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