style="font-size:15px;"> Although tactfully taciturn at the time, Coubertin chafed at King George’s power move and the Americans’ enthusiasm for it. He unsheathed his pen to reassert his vision for the sports festival—to have it circumnavigate the globe to spread the Olympic gospel. Harking back to promises made at the 1894 Paris congress, he firmly insisted, “It was there agreed that every country should celebrate the Olympic games in turn.”102 And the Baron pulled a power move of his own, informing the Greeks that they were welcome to hold their own athletic festivals as long as they didn’t use the phrase “Olympic Games.” That Greek term densely embedded in Greek history apparently belonged to him.103
In the wake of the 1896 Games, Vikelas stepped down as the head of the IOC, and Coubertin ascended from general secretary to president. He held this position until 1925, when at the age of 62 he retired. His extended tenure set the tone for future presidents to remain at the helm of the IOC for long periods of time. To date, the IOC has had just nine presidents in its 120-year history.
Unfairness at the Fair
At the turn of the century the Olympics did not yet enjoy the cachet they have today, so the 1900 Games in Paris and the 1904 Games in St. Louis had to affix themselves to the enormous cosmopolitan institutions of the day—World’s Fairs. The early modern Olympics were mere sideshows to the World’s Fairs, not the main event on the world stage that we see today.
Early on it was clear that Paris would present challenges to the IOC. Coubertin’s French compatriots were anything but eager to host the Games. The Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques resisted Coubertin’s proposal even though the Baron was the general secretary of the group. After considerable finagling, Coubertin was forced to fasten his beloved Games onto the Exposition Universelle in order to get them staged at all. Fair organizers dreaded including the Olympics, partly because French politicians and the professoriat deemed sports a lowbrow pursuit. The Baron responded by calling the Exposition “a vulgar glorified fair: exactly the opposite of what we wanted the Olympic Games to be.”104 When French sport officials performed a volte-face and decided to manage the Games themselves, Coubertin and the IOC found themselves on the outside looking in. As at Athens, local organizers marginalized Coubertin, sometimes even snubbing him. This left a bitter taste in the Baron’s mouth.105
Attaching the Olympics to the World’s Fair meant significant trade-offs. For starters, competition stretched over the many months that the Fair took place—in the case of Paris, some 167 days spanning July through October. Organizers insisted on referring to the sports events as the “Competitions of the Exhibition” rather than the “Olympics Games,” a decision that irked Coubertin; he called it “a poor and clumsy title we had to accept for the time being for want of something more elegant and appropriate.”106 Compounding Coubertin’s chagrin, sporting competitions were scattered amid an array of unrelated events, leading to confusion among spectators as to what was an Olympic event and what wasn’t. Even athletes weren’t sure. Some returned home uncertain of whether they had even participated in the Olympics. In 1900, the Luxembourg-born French runner Michel Théato triumphed in the marathon. Yet he only figured out he was an Olympic champion some twelve years later, when Olympic statisticians waded through the mess to sync up their records, deciding which of the events were officially Olympic and which were just part of the Fair.107
The Paris Games of 1900 did offer a few bright spots. With Coubertin marginalized, these Olympics were the first in which women were invited to participate, with around twenty women traveling to France to compete in sports like tennis and golf. Charlotte Cooper of Great Britain was the first woman to become an Olympic champion, winning gold in tennis. Cooper, who had already won three Wimbledon tennis tournaments and would go on to win two more, defeated Hélène Prévost of France in straight sets, 6–4, 6–2. Cooper also teamed up with fellow Briton Reginald Doherty to earn the gold medal in mixed doubles, defeating Prévost who joined forces with Harold Mahoney of Ireland. Margaret Abbott became the first woman from the United States to win gold. She beat out nine other women competing in the nine-hole golf tournament. Abbott, a Chicago socialite who had traveled to Paris in 1899 to study art, accompanied by her mother, the novelist and editor Mary Ives Abbott, chalked up her victory in part to the other competitors’ sartorial standards, commenting that “all the French girls … turned up to play in high heels and tight skirts.” The Games were so disorganized that the twenty-two-year-old golf champion had no idea that the tournament she won was part of the Olympics. She died without knowing she was an Olympic victor.
The uptick in women’s involvement was part of a larger trend: six times as many athletes participated in Paris as at Athens, coming from twenty-six countries and engaging in twenty-four sports. Yet participation was hampered by the prohibitive cost of travel, which gave a leg up to wealthier countries whose national sport committees could defray travel and living expenses. Such unequal participation is bricked into the Olympics to this day.108
Coubertin saw the Games’ domination by the Universal Exhibition as a disaster. He resolved that the IOC should never again allow the Olympics to get hijacked by a World’s Fair, “where their philosophical value vanishes into thin air and their education merit becomes nil.” After the 1900 Games, Coubertin decided that Olympism would have to assert its independence and “no longer be reduced to the role of humiliated vassal to which it had been subjected in Paris.”109
But humiliation was precisely what the Olympics would experience at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, where matters went from bad to worse, despite the backing of the popular US president Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was named honorary president of the 1904 Olympics and even agreed to appear at the Games in person, an apt endorsement from a man the New York Times credited with catalyzing “a Nation of brawn and muscle.”110 Despite Roosevelt’s imprimatur, the Baron sensed disaster. He reported experiencing “a sort of presentiment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of the town.” His assessment of St. Louis was blunt: “There was no beauty, no originality.” Attaching the Games to the World’s Fair only brought him feelings of “repugnance.” He didn’t even make the voyage to St. Louis.111
Neither did many athletes from Europe, leaving the field open for American and Canadian domination—of the 617 competitors who paid the two-dollar entrance fee plus fifty cents per event, 525 were from the United States and forty-one were from Canada. Meanwhile, women’s participation declined, with only eight females competing. The World’s Fair (officially the Louisiana Purchase Exposition) was once again spread across months, from May through November.112 The official Olympics lasted a week spanning August and September, but organizers created confusion by referring to all athletic competitions in the wider exhibition as “Olympic events.” As one participant from Milwaukee recalled: “The Olympics didn’t amount to much then. They were only a little tiny part of the big show in St. Louis. There was not much of an international flavor to the Games. It was largely a meet between American athletic clubs. I ran for the Milwaukee A. C. [Amateur Club] and I never gave any real thought to the idea that I was representing the United States of America.”113
Worse yet, the St. Louis Olympics were tarnished by the inclusion of the Anthropology Days, a sequence of athletic events in mid-August that allowed social scientists and sport bigwigs to test racist hypotheses. The Anthropology Days were not part of the official Olympic program, but World’s Fair organizers often called them the “Special Olympics” and billed them as “the first athletic meeting held anywhere, in which savages were exclusive participants.”114
The Anthropology Days pitted ethnic and racial groups against one another in events like track and field to see which group, supposedly, was the most athletically gifted. Anthropology Days organizers aimed to whet spectators’ appetites for the official Games that would follow, but another motive was to contrast what they called “savages” to the highly trained athletes from the United States and Europe. To do this, they rigged the system to ensure that
