‘“English games dressed in Greek clothes by a Frenchman.” Discuss this comment on the Modern Olympic Games.’

Thus the lofty voice of whoever it is that says those things that students have to discuss – in this case, me, as part of the historical background to a course on the politics of sport. The trick is to distinguish carefully the three logically independent propositions implied by the three phrases and to assess them separately. Were they English games? Possibly not originally because the origins of most games are lost in the ‘mists’ of the undocumented past. But certainly in their modernised and codified forms most modern sports and games began in the schools, universities and clubs of England. As did the original ideology of those games, the concern for amateurism and ‘gentlemanly conduct’.

The very idea of the ‘Olympics’ obviously harked back to the games which started in 776 BC and were terminated in 393 (though may have continued in a semi-clandestine way for some time after that). The harking back was partly to their supposed nobility, but also to many of the details. Track and field athletics almost inevitably became the prime sport of the games and its procedures were almost set in stone when three Oxford men met to form the Amateur Athletics Association in 1880. The popular ‘throwing the cricket ball’ was replaced by the classical javelin and the discus was reintroduced – the vases were the guide, not the vernacular. Finally, though there had been many stated attempts to revive the ancient games over the centuries – and an increasing frequency of such in the 19th century – it was a Parisian, the Baron Pierre De Coubertin, born in 1863, who demonstrated the kind of persistence and nous necessary to achieve a movement on a sufficient scale. The games therefore have three spiritual homes: Greece, France and England.

In fact, De Coubertin was an Anglophile and was very sceptical about the modern Greeks. This should not be taken to imply a hostility to Greece, but he was very well aware that the Greeks would naturally tend to want to ‘own’ a games called Olympics and that such ownership would become fairly complete if there were a permanent modern Olympic site in Greece. The reference to ancient Greece offered a powerful sense of antecedence with a near-universal appeal, but also a threat to the kind of global sporting movement he envisaged. The paradox was evident even late in his life after he had left his active role in the IOC and was accepting an award from the Greek government for services to Greek culture which was presented at the ancient site of Olympia. He confesses in his Mémoires that even at the moment the award was made his mind was not in Olympia, but in Rugby School with the prone faux-medieval statue of Thomas Arnold. He attributed Arnold with no less than the reinvention of what he called chevalerie – which Arnold himself had called gentlemanly education and which both Arnold and De Coubertin saw as an antidote to modern greed and commercialism and an important hope for the world.

Most historians have tended to debunk Coubertin’s worship of Arnold, which started with the French version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and led fairly quickly to an ecstatic pilgrimage to Rugby in 1883. They have pointed out quite reasonably that Arnold, unlike some Victorian public-school headmasters, had little enthusiasm for games as such. But the counter-argument is that Arnold let the boys develop their own games while insisting on setting their moral tone. I have compared Arnold in this respect to George I, who didn’t do very much, but, more than any previous monarch, allowed his country to develop what the philosopher David Hume called an unprecedented ‘system of liberty’.

The issue of a permanent Greek site for the modern Olympics has never been fully expunged from the agenda. Even to many people who are not Greek it makes both economic and political sense. Building massive sports resources for an event that lasts weeks has little economic logic to it and Greece has, for the most part (the exception being ‘the colonels’ government of 1967-74), been run by regimes which few people could take exception to, thus avoiding the condoning of authoritarian governments for which the IOC has regularly stood accused. The possibility of a permanent site was probably at a maximum in the years when the Montreal games of 1976 lost an estimated $753 million. The doctrine which has been most invoked is to keep the circulation of host cities going is that of ‘legacy’ – that the inspiration and facilities will enhance sport in the host nation especially. Statistically, this seems to be somewhere between vague and spurious, but the more convincing reason is that in an age of global media governments are able to present the securing of host status as an important success and (often a subsequent government) can present itself to the world in a favourable light. Cultural sociologists tend to regard the Olympics as a ‘global mega-event’, the premier example of its kind, its main rival being football’s World Cup.

It was all very different in Paris in 1900. For most of modern Olympic history the governance of the games has been described as a three-legged stool with the IOC, the international sports federations and the host city (along with its governing country) serving to support the presentation of the games themselves. Of course there have been conflicts, some of them highly complex, but, except during the world wars, the games have gone on. That was not what happened in Paris in 1900. The host city took entire control of the games and extended them over five months as part of the Paris Exposition or World Fair. There was no opening or closing ceremony and the events were spread over many existing venues. The director of the event, Alfred Picard, was not so much indifferent to the aspirations of the IOC as hostile: he declared the reference to the ancient games to be an ‘absurd anachronism’ and the word ‘Olympic’ was almost never used. Ballooning, motor racing and pelota were among the events never to be seen again at the games and some sports, such as cricket, were clearly played at a very low standard. The overall direction was in the hands of Daniel Mérillon of the French shooting federation.

It is clear that almost nothing that makes people yearn to be Olympians was present in Paris in 1900. The games were – and were described as being – ‘farcical’. Coubertin bitterly regretted what he described as his ‘surrender’ to the local organisers and speculated that, whereas Athens in 1896 had been a good start, his native city was on the verge of finishing the Olympic movement almost before it had begun. It is also clear that Coubertin and Picard were moved by the same spectre, that of France’s six-week defeat in the Franco-Prussian War 30 years earlier. De Coubertin saw the pressing need as a revival of noble military virtue which led him to hark back to Greece, but also to invent his own Olympic event, the ‘modern pentathlon’. Picard, like his contemporaries the Italian Futurists, saw the only hope as being a full embrace of modernity and technology; the future, and France’s hopes of revival, lay with motor racing, not javelin throwing.

Almost miraculously when the games returned to Paris in 1924 they had begun to resemble the Olympics as later generations have known them, with a high level of competition, a proper stadium  (Colombes), 44 countries competing, large crowds and well-publicised opening and closing ceremonies. It had not been an easy time to run an international organisation with regional wars and a world war as well as revolutions in several major countries. The St Louis games in 1904 were predominantly American, also attached to a broader exposition and no less farcical than Paris. London in 1908 was a step forward, with the games treated as a sort of adjunct to the London season and a well-publicised Anglo-American rivalry. Stockholm in 1912 offered higher levels of organisation than previously, but Berlin in 1916 did not, of course, take place while Antwerp in 1920 involved only ‘allied’ nations and was marked by improvisation, poor attendances and financial losses. The 1981 film Chariots of Fire probably exaggerates the extent to which the 1924 games were the most important thing in many peoples’ lives, but not ridiculously so. Since then, the games had setbacks as a result of boycotts and financial losses, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, but essentially they have thrived.

The Olympic movement can be accused of many things. It has lent prestige to many repressive regimes, especially to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In doing so it has been massively hypocritical about such matters as amateurism and drugs. It sold out its original ideals to commercialism. It has presented itself as the pinnacle of sport, whereas many of the world’s greatest athletes have lived their sporting lives far away from the games. But what it cannot be accused of is failure. Paris 2024 is a global mega-event, which both spectators and competitors will yearn to attend. Credit is due to a century and a quarter of IOC resilience and determination. What must be understood about the games is that they have magic, what some cultural sociologists have called the ‘fairy dust’ that makes billions of people briefly and intensely interested in weightlifting or field hockey if their nation might win a medal in it. Add nationalism and internationalism and a mega-event and stir the pot… Perhaps the word we should use is the old Scottish Lallans word for casting a spell: glamour. We should also remember that there is black magic involved; mega-events are ideal for terrorists and criminals.