This article is part of FT Globetrotter. Paris guide
The Victorian British codified modern versions of most sports, but saw no point in playing them against foreigners. That is why most international sports competitions were invented in Paris. Many of these competitions, 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 stories, while the new Aquatic Center is a model sports venue. for the green era. Everything requires a sports tour of Paris.
The first leg of the trip will take us to various points within the city itself, all of them easily accessible by bicycle or metro. We will then travel five minutes north on the RER commuter train to Seine-Saint-Denis, the disadvantaged area. department that will be the heart of the Games. The longest trip to Versailles is only for the most enthusiastic.
Birthplace of the modern Olympic Games
We will begin at the Grand Amphitheater of the University of the Sorbonne, where in June 1894 a small Parisian with a big mustache, 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 Olympic Games. “It has been granted to us,” the 31-year-old man explained to them, in the then universal French language, “to gather in this great city of Paris, whose joys and anxieties are shared by the world, to be able to call it its nervous center.”
Having sat in that magnificent auditorium and struggling with its acoustics, I wonder how many of them heard it. Still, his statement, at the time, was a cliché. Of course the delegates met at the Navel of the World. Of course they were listening to a Frenchman trying to civilize them. The delegates voted in favor of Coubertin’s proposal, as he later wrote, “mainly to please me.” Website; Addresses
Birthplace of the Tour de France
Twenty minutes north by bike or taxi from the Sorbonne (or 30 minutes by metro) is Rue du Faubourg Montmartre. Here, at lunch in November 1902, in a now-defunct brasserie called Zimmer, a journalist from the newspaper L’Auto suggested to the editor that they invent a bicycle race through France. The editor gave a time-honored Parisian answer: “For me it’s a no.” Anyway, the newspaper’s financier created the Tour de France. Addresses
Birthplace of FIFA and the World Cup
Cycle southwest to 229 Rue Sainte-Honoré. In an office located in this courtyard, in May 1904, seven men, including the son of the French shopkeeper, Jules Rimet, founded the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, FIFA. Rimet would later become its president and create the soccer World Cup. Addresses
Cradle of motor sports
From Rue Saint-Honoré, walk ten minutes southwest to Place de la Concorde, Olympic venue this summer for the “urban” sports BMX freestyle, skateboarding, breakdancing and three-on-three basketball. In Concorde, find the mansion that flies the flag of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). A month after Rimet and others founded FIFA, fancy car enthusiasts here created the FIA and began drafting international rules for motor racing. Addresses
Then it’s on to the major Olympic venues, starting with the main Olympic stadium (below) in Seine-Saint-Denis, five minutes north of Paris by RER commuter train from Gare du Nord station.
France Stadium
This national stadium was built for the 1998 World Cup. Its most famous night remains France’s 3-0 victory over Brazil in that year’s final, with two headed goals from Zinedine Zidane. The Stadium was built with an athletics track, with a view to one day serving as an Olympic stadium. That moment will finally come when it hosts rugby, athletics, For athletics and the closing ceremony.
An office district emerged around it. The plan was to regenerate the impoverished Seine-Saint-Denis. But today, the concrete stadium next to the A1 motorway, with only soulless office towers for neighbors, looks like a traffic island in a 1990s dystopia. The Stade has not regenerated Seine-Saint-Denis. The department remains the poorest in mainland France. Website; Addresses
Aquatic center
The Stade de France is now being embarrassed by a much smaller, tent-like structure that has just opened on the other side of the motorway, connected by a pedestrian bridge: the Aquatic center, the only permanent sports facility built specifically for these Games. Its sloped roof, designed to reduce the distance from the top of the stands to the pool, is a nod to that of its larger neighbor. Here’s a state-of-the-art building from the 2020s versus a state-of-the-art building from the 1990s.
Comparing the two, you see the advancement of green architecture. The Aquatic Center is built largely of pine wood and has a solar park on its roof (one of the largest in France). Plastic seats for spectators around the pool were made in a nearby factory from bottle caps and shampoo bottles, some of them collected by local schoolchildren. The center was built by two architects, Laure Mériaud and Cécilia Gross. Mériaud says: “Here we are in a building that says out loud: ‘It can be done differently.’”
While the Stade was a statement of French grandeur, the Aquatic Center has a neighborhood feel. After hosting the Games’ swimming, water polo and diving events, capacity around the main pool will be reduced, creating space for sports such as paddle tennis and climbing, and the building will be opened to locals. The goal is to transform the office district around the two large sports structures into a neighborhood, with apartment blocks, trees and pedestrian streets. In Seine-Saint-Denis, one in two 11-year-old children does not know how to swim. They can learn at the Aquatic Center. It will be “a place of life,” says Mériaud. Website; Addresses
Finally, any sports history buff should visit three other Olympic venues:
Yves-du-Manoir Stadium, Colombes
To the northwest of the city is the only 2024 venue that also served the 1924 Paris Olympics. Back then, it was the main stadium, site of the sprint triumphs of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, immortalized in the 1981 film. Fire cars. In 1938, Colombes hosted the final of the football World Cup, won by fascist Italy. This summer features Olympic field hockey. Website; Addresses
The Roland-Garros clay tennis courts
Located in the leafy, bourgeois 16th arrondissement of southwestern Paris, the Roland-Garros complex, built in 1928, has witnessed the glories and disasters of modern France. When the war began in 1939, the French government used the complex as “a temporary camp for the detention of ‘undesirable foreigners,’” wrote Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian Jewish author who was interned here for 10 days. “We were housed in a kind of strange grotto, under the great stand of the central tennis court.”
After the Nazis took Paris, Roland-Garros returned to its original tennis function with an annual tournament. Rafael Nadal won 14 French Opens here. This summer, the complex will also host Olympic boxing. Website; Addresses
Across the street is the fabulous Art Deco swimming pool, the Piscine Molitor, now in a Private club. Here, in 1946, the striptease dancer Micheline Bernardini modeled the first bikini, designed by the automotive engineer Louis Réard in 1946. Bernardini is still present, he is 96 years old.
Palace of Versailles
The most beautiful venue of the Games will not be Paris itself. He The Palace of Versailles, a suburban train ride from the capital, will host the equestrian and modern pentathlon events in its sumptuous venues. If you visit, go around the corner to the small Royal tennis courtwhere pre-revolutionary courtiers played “jeu de paume”, the ancestor of tennis.
The deputies of the Third Estate met in this building on June 20, 1789, weeks before the French Revolution, and took the “tennis court oath”: they would remain together until they achieved a written constitution for France. In Paris, the entire history of sport is built on layers of past history. Website; Addresses
What is your favorite Parisian sports venue? Will you be in or visiting the city during the Olympic Games? Tell us in the comments below. AND follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
