The first Olympics held in Paris, in 1900, were a farce. Coubertin had intended them to serve as the sporting component of the Exposition Universelle. Its chief organiser, Alfred Picard, was less keen, dismissing Coubertin’s games for a few hundred amateur male athletes as ‘cheap and unfit to represent the nation’, while the neo-Hellenism of the Olympic movement was seen as an ‘absurd anachronism’. The official programme of the exhibition included a range of sports that were popular in late 19th
