100 years of the Games

Having proposed the Olympic revival in 1892, it was through USFSA that de Courbetin set about organising an International Congress for ‘the study and Propagation of Amateur Exercises’ which was held at the Sorbonne University in June 1894. Seventy-nine delegates and sports associations from thirteen countries, including two representatives of the Irish Amateur Athletic Association (IAAA), attended, voting to re-establish the Olympic Games and to create an International Olympic Committee (IOC) to lead its organisation.

‘Ireland forever’ – The Quest for Olympic Recognition

Expansive as it undoubtedly was, there were limits to Baron Pierre de Coubertin vision for a revived Olympics. The French founder of the modern Olympics, who also served as president of the IOC for almost 30 years, espoused many of the conservative attitudes and political prejudices that were typical to men of his time and privileged class, not least when it came to the potential involvement of women in competitive sport – de Coubertin was vehemently opposed.

Olympic representation was limited to recognised States. While the struggle for Irish independence continued, Irish athletes had to participate under another banner – most frequently, the British banner. At the Intercalated Games in Athens in 1906, for instance, Co. Waterford native Peter O’Connor, incensed at the ceremonial hoisting of a Union Jack to honour his silver medal for the long jump, scaled the Olympic flagpole to wave a green flag bearing the message ‘Erin go Bragh’ (‘Ireland Forever’) as fellow Irish athlete, Con Leahy, and others stood guard below him.

Not long after this remarkable, if rare act, of Irish athlete protest, Roger Casement – a diplomat in the British colonial service turned anti-Imperialist Irish nationalist – drafted a proposal for Ireland to establish its own Olympic Committee with the aim of ensuring separate Irish representation at the 1908 Olympic Games in London. ‘No one can deny to Ireland the status of a “country”’, he wrote. ‘A state or a kingdom she may not be, but a country she surely is…’

As events transpired, the establishment of an Irish Olympic Council would not occur until April 1920. It was established at a meeting in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel where J.J. Keane was appointed chairman and Andy Harty secretary – both were leading lights in the Gaelic Athletic Association’s (GAA) Athletic Council, a committee created by Ireland’s largest sporting organisation to manage its athletic affairs, its principal preoccupation being the promotion of the national pastimes of Gaelic football and hurling.

Athletic "patron saints" – Ireland’s First Olympians

Roger Casement letter’s proposing the establishment of an Irish Olympic Committee, written in 1907, underscored the complex interactions of sport and politics. Its ultimate aspiration was nevertheless a simple one: to secure the right of ‘the Irishman’ to enter himself in the Olympic Games ‘in the name of and for the fame of Ireland’.

Before this right was finally conceded, Irish athletes were not precluded from Olympic participation. They competed from the start - and with remarkable success. Across the six Olympiads held during Ireland’s pre-independence era, Irish athletes would claim 25 gold medals and many more silver and bronze, but their accomplishments were accredited variously to Great Britain, the United States and even South Africa.

The first Irish champion was not an obvious Olympian. He had travelled to Athens in 1896 with no intention of competing, only to observe. He was a trained barrister and an Irish Parliamentary Party MP at Westminster for 18 years, but before that, Dublin-born John Pius Boland (from the well-known family which owned the Boland Mills in Dublin) was an Oxford student prevailed upon to enter the Olympics lawn tennis tournament by a Greek friend, who was a member of the organising IOC. He won two gold medals, one in the singles and one in the double’s tournament. When he returned to his student life and found his victory attributed to England in an Oxford university magazine, Boland, an Irish nationalist, committed to his journal. ‘I refuse to foreswear my ‘Hibernian origin’ and the green flag in the field of sport.’

For Irish medallists who competed and won in the singlets of the United States, there was no such unease. The absence of an Irish political quarrel with America was an obvious reason for this, as was the inclination to imagine their successes as reflecting almost as gloriously upon Ireland as the country they were representing. Eamon (‘Ned’) Broy, who would serve almost twenty years as President of the Irish Olympic Council, later recalled how cuttings from American newspapers highlighting the world-beating performances of these Irish-born athletes would be sent home to Ireland from relatives’ resident in the U.S. According to Broy, their achievements ‘kept Irish prestige high before the nations of the world. Whilst Ireland, unfree, could not participate in world competition, her athletic "patron saints" in America did the next best thing by putting up the Stars and Stripes at the Olympic Games and leaving nobody in doubt as to the land of their birth.’

Among these “patron saints” were the remarkable figures of Tom Kiely, James Mitchell, Matt McGrath, Patrick Ryan, John Flanagan and Martin Sheridan, the latter trumpeted as the greatest all-round athlete of his era as the winner of 5 gold, 3 silver and 1 bronze medals across three Olympic Games. The high-point, however, of Irish-American Olympic achievement came at the Antwerp Games in 1920 when Irish competitors representing the USA returned with a medal haul extending to seven gold, two silver and one bronze. Among the gold medallists was the Limerick-born World record holder for the hammer throw, Paddy Ryan, a construction labourer in New York who had spent last year of the Great War in France as part of the American expeditionary force.

In 1924, fourteen years after he had emigrated from Ireland, Ryan returned to his native Pallasgreen to live out the remainder of a long life on his family farm. This same year, a newly independent, if partitioned, Ireland made its Olympic Games debut – in Paris.

Paris – Les Années folles 

In the decade following the First World War, France’s capital could lay legitimate claim to have been the epicentre of the cultural intellectual and political world. It was here the leaders of most of the world’s major powers had come in their efforts to forge a more stable world order in the aftermath of the destruction of the Great War and where, in 1919, Ireland’s hopes of having its self-proclaimed independence recognised on the international stage had been dashed. 

Paris was then a city of 2.9 million people and, across the ensuing decade, it teemed with creativity: dancers, musicians, painters, sculptors and writers from France and much further afield, including Irish novelist James Joyce and a young Samuel Beckett (whose uncle competed for Ireland at the Games in Paris 1924 as captain of the waterpolo team), took up residence in a city that vibrated with artistic and intellectual activity. Pleasure-seekers came too, drawn by the city’s extravagances and a personal and social permissiveness that other societies denied. It was against this backdrop, of what became known as les Années folles, that the 1924 Olympics were staged. 

The decision to award the Olympics to Paris had been taken by the International Olympic Committee in 1921 in deference to the wishes of a soon to be departing Pierre de Coubertin. However, it was not to the city itself but to the industrial suburbs that the Games were ultimately brought. A costly plan to construct a grand stade, capable of catering to 100,000 spectators, was rejected by the Paris municipal council, with the effect that the main Olympic activity was moved to a specially enlarged Stade de Colombes, home to the multi-sport Racing Club de France. 

That stadium still stands and is now sandwiched between a motorway and high-rise buildings. Having fallen into disrepair, it has once again been renovated for the Paris 2024 Olympics and will play host to the men and women’s field hockey tournaments.

Paris 1924: ‘Ireland’ steps onto the Olympic stage

In April 1922, a delighted J.J. Keane, first President of the Irish Olympic Council, wrote to Pierre de Coubertin, IOC President, to declare that, following the achievement of Irish independence, any barriers to Ireland’s Olympic entry had been cleared: ‘I have great pleasure in telling you that my country is now a ‘Free State’, and that it holds, on a common footing, the same rights as an autonomous state in the British Empire as Canada, Australia, South Africa etc. The conditions laid down by your committee as essential for acceptance of Ireland’s application is thus complied with.’

The independence hailed by J.J. Keane did not extend to whole island of Ireland. The new constitutional arrangements involved a partition settlement with the Irish Free State covering only 26 of the island’s 32 counties. Yet, in advance of travelling to Paris for an Olympics that would be immortalised in the Oscar-winning film, Chariots of Fire, one Irish newspaper declared that there was ‘no border on the field of sport…We shall not inquire the political allegiance of the men who bring home the laurels of victory. That they are Irishmen, chosen to represent Ireland, will be enough to merit for them the congratulations of all.’

The team that travelled to Paris was mostly men, though not exclusively so. Among the group were two women – Phoebe Blair White and Hilda Wallis – who competed as a double’s partnership in tennis, the last time the sport would be included in an Olympic programme until 1988. Joining this sporting pair were sixteen footballers; eight boxers, most of them members of the Irish army; a squad of ten water polo players; and eleven athletes, among them high-jumper and All-Ireland championship winning gaelic footballer, Larry Stanley, and John O’Grady, a shot-putter from Co. Limerick, who became the first person to carry an Irish flag into an Olympic athletics arena. On 5 July 1924, approximately 1,000, athletes from 44 countries entered the Stade de Colombes for the opening ceremony of the Paris 1924 Olympics, their flag-bearers, O’Grady among them, all dipping their colours as they passed the recently elected President of the French Republic, Gaston Doumergue, and other dignitaries.

The Irish team was poorly represented among the opening day throng in the Olympic Stadium. Only the track and field athletes participated, as the boxing and water polo teams had yet to arrive in Paris. The footballers, in contrast, had already returned home from the twenty-two team soccer tournament that had run from late May to early June. The Irish team, attired in blue jerseys, with a display of green shamrock embroidered on a white badge over the heart, exited the competition at the quarter-final stage, losing 2-1 after extra-time to a Netherlands side that would itself be defeated by the eventual champions, Uruguay.

Significantly, Ireland’s sole medal winners were not athletes, but artists: Jack B. Yeats - whose brother, William Butler Yeats, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the year before - won a silver medal for his painting, The Liffey Swim, now part of the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. This was one better than Oliver St. John Gogarty, a surgeon, writer and Senator in the new Free State, who had attended the founding meeting of the Irish Olympic Council four years earlier. Gogarty’s bronze medal was awarded in the literary competition for his Ode to the Tailteann Games, commissioned by the Irish Government and soon after to be sung by a massed, 500-member choir at the opening ceremony of the Tailteann Games in Dublin.

An Irish Olympiad – The Tailteann Games

Although grander in scale than any of the previous Olympiads – the number of participating countries had jumped from 19 to 44 in just four years – the Paris Games were not the biggest sporting event in the world in 1924. That distinction went to the Tailteann Games, or Aonach Tailteann, which were held in Dublin just a week after events in Paris concluded. The Tailteann Games were modelled on the Olympics and the similarities and linkages between the two were striking. Both offered programmes combining athletic events and cultural competitions; both involved grand opening and closing ceremonies; and both featured at least some of the same competitors. Among the 5,000 Tailteann Games competitors were 6 gold medallists from Paris, including the brilliant American swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, later famous for playing the title role in the Tarzan movies.

The majority of competing athletes, however, were Irish-born or from Irish diaspora backgrounds in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA. This was, in part, the point of it. The Tailteann Games involved the revival of an ancient athletic festival and its reimagining for a modern age: Irish nationalist legend told that the games could be traced to 632 B.C. when they were held in Teltown, Co. Meath, as funeral games – with cultural contests held alongside athletic and equestrian events –organised by Lughaidh Lamhfáda to honour his mother/stepmother, Queen Tailte. Significantly and symbolically, it was claimed that the last Aonach Tailteann had been held in 1169 AD, on the eve of Norman Invasion of Ireland.

The idea of a Tailteann revival had been floated in the 1880s but was only seriously taken up with the establishment of an Irish Free State government. Originally planned for the summer of 1922, the turmoil associated with the civil war caused by the Anglo-Irish settlement of the previous December, forced a deferral of the Tailteann until August 1924. For the new Irish government, the decision to invest in the games was as much political as sporting: not only would they help advertise the new State; they would equally foster relations with Irish emigrant populations across the globe.

The Tailteann Games were not a once-off: they were repeated in 1928 and 1932, again to coincide with the staging of the Olympic Games.

The Power of Protest: Alice Milliat and the Changing profile of Olympic Sport

Of the more than 3,000 athletes that competed at the Paris Olympics of 1924, only 135 were women, a far cry from the gender equal 50/50 representation at this year’s Olympic Games. Paltry as their numbers were, the participation of women at the Paris 1924 Games still represented progress of a sort, as the Olympics envisaged by Pierre de Coubertin were to be for male athletes only, a preserve of gentlemen amateurs. For this reason, no women participated in the first modern Olympic Games when held in Athens in 1896.

Where women did initially become eligible to compete, it was notable that it was in such events as tennis, golf, archery, swimming, and gymnastics that were considered suitably genteel and therefore more socially acceptable – in many of the competing countries, these sports were already patronised by women from privileged backgrounds.

But with track and field athletics – centrepieces of the Olympic programme – still closed to women, on 20 August 1922, Paris hosted a Women’s World Games at Stade Pershing. Inspired by Nantes-born feminist and sports organiser Alice Milliat, herself an accomplished rower, this first ‘Women’s Olympics’ – more would follow – attracted a field of 77 female athletes from five countries to compete across 11 track and field events.

A founder of the Fédération sportive féminine internationale (FSFI) in October 1921, Milliat’s initiative drew a large crowd but it didn’t move mindsets fast enough to ensure access to the Paris Games. The momentum built was nevertheless unstoppable. Consequently, and notwithstanding enduring societal prejudice and continued misgivings on its part, the IOC decided in 1926 to allow the limited entry women into track and field athletics – it was the year after the retirement of Pierre de Coubertin.

Green Gold – ‘Ireland’s’ first Olympic Champions

When Ireland competed at the first Olympic Games in Paris in 1924 it did so without any financial support from the fledgling Irish Free State. For the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, however, the Irish government committed £1,000 to support Irish participation. It did so for political rather than sporting reasons. As the team would represent ‘not merely’ the Irish Free State, but Ireland ‘as a whole’, an Irish government memorandum noted that the Olympics represented an opportunity to emphasise ‘amongst the nations the essential unity of Ireland.’

The standout performer on the Irish team of 1928 was Dr Pat O’Callaghan, a brilliant all-round sportsman from Kanturk in Co. Cork, whose gold medal in the hammer throw event made him the first representative of an independent Ireland to become Olympic champion. O’Callaghan repeated the feat four years later in Los Angeles, securing his second gold medal within an hour of Co. Tipperary’s Bob Tisdall also claiming gold in the 400m hurdles.

Reaction to these achievements underscored the capacity of the Olympics to capture the public imagination: the two athletes would subsequently return to a rapturous homecoming involving a procession through the streets of Dublin witnessed by a quarter of a million people.

‘Sport is where we started, sport is where we grew’ – The Beginnings of the Paralympics

The first summer Olympic Games to be held after the Second World – and after a gap of 12 years – was in London in 1948. On the same say as the opening ceremony was being staged at Wembley Stadium, an archery tournament involving sixteen wheelchair-bound patients – 14 men and 2 women – was held further north at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, home to a specialist unit for treating spinal injuries led by neurologist, Dr Ludwig Guttman, whose Jewish family had fled Nazi Germany just before the war’s outbreak.

Although not the first to identify the value of exercise, recreational and sports therapy in treating disabilities, Guttman considered it crucial to the maintenance of morale and to a rehabilitative process, the principal aim of which was to enable men and women to live full, meaningful lives, ‘as useful and respected citizens in the community’. In time, Guttman would be hailed as a ‘Coubertin for the paraplegics’ as his 1948 archery tournament became an annual, international multi-sport event that evolved, ultimately, into what is recognised as the first-ever Paralympics.

Staged in Rome in September 1960 a week after the ending of the Olympics in the same city, up to 400 athletes from 23 nations participated in eight disciplines in what was still known officially as the ‘Stoke Mandeville Games’. Among them was a five-person Irish team, including Joan Horan, Ireland’s first female Paralympian who secured two gold medals, one each for archery and swimming.

All members of the Irish team were former patients at Stoke Mandeville and their first Paralympic experience would end up transforming the disability landscape in Ireland and, with it, the lives of generations of Irish wheelchair users. For while the accommodation encountered in Rome was largely inaccessible, Oliver Murphy from Drogheda, one of the team members, recalled that the games ‘opened our eyes to how people in wheelchairs were treated in other countries, they had a better life, they were living independently.’

Within months of returning from Rome, the Paralympians were at the fore in establishing the Irish Wheelchair Association (IWA) to champion the rights of, and improve services for, citizens with physical disabilities. Interviewed decades later about the IWA’s foundation, Oliver Murphy remarked: ‘Sport is where we started, sport is where we grew. It’s still so fundamental to who we are today as an organisation.’

‘Olympic glory is for amateurs’? – The Olympic Games Enters the Professional Era

Increased female participation across the last century has been only one feature of a much broader Olympic transformation.

The aristocratic era of the early Olympiads was replaced by a movement that, as new countries joined, steadily became more socially, ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse. One consequence of an expanding Olympics was the pressure it placed on the established Olympic principle of amateurism: the traditional Anglo-Saxon, muscular Christian image of the ‘gentleman amateur’ was alien to the sporting cultures of new Olympic nations where attitudes to ‘broken-time payments’ – a form of monetary compensation to allow athletes absent themselves from work to compete – were less rigid. Divisions ran deep on the issue, yet in 1930 the IOC endorsed a definition of amateurism that ensured it applied only to those who had ‘never received re-imbursement or compensation for loss of salary’.

This position held for decades and athletes suspected of breaching the amateur code were banned. As late as 1972, IOC President Avery Brundage was declaring that ‘Olympic glory is for amateurs’. Yet for reasons that were at once political and commercial, the reality, increasingly, was otherwise. The entry of the Soviet Union into the Olympics in 1952 and the onset of the ‘Cold War’ saw the Olympics cast as a sporting test of the superiority of rival political and economic systems, with eastern bloc states employing their top athletes in the civil service or armed services to enable them to prepare as de facto professionals.

Coupled with this increasing politicalisation was a growing commercialisation, fuelled by the coming of television and the slew of global brand sponsorships that followed. The result was a remoulding of the Olympics into both a lucrative business and mass media spectacle that was impossible to reconcile with an amateur ethos already strained by the demands of rising competition standards, by individual commercial inducements and growing evidence of performance-enhancing drug taking.

Incrementally, from the early 1970s onwards, the IOC relaxed its amateur ethic repeatedly until, in 1988, athletes were allowed to compete without restriction for the first time. What followed was an opening of the Olympics to fully professionalised sports such as basketball and golf and the onset of a new era that also placed a fresh responsibility on States to finance proper programmes of support for Olympic athletes. In Ireland, a new Irish Sports Council (now Sport Ireland) was established in 1999 and two years later it published its first high performance strategy. Today’s Irish Olympic and Paralympic athletes benefit from financial supports based on an international carding system and access to world-class facilities at Sport Ireland Campus in Dublin.

From Participants to Elite Performers – The Evolution of the Paralympics

The dramatic changes that swept across Olympic sport were mirrored, surpassed even, by those experienced by the Paralympics. A new direction for the latter was set with the establishment of an International Paralympic Committee (IPC) in 1989, which assumed responsibilities theretofore exercised by the International Coordinating Committee of World Organizations for the Disabled.

Bonn-based, the IPC developed the practice – re-established after a gap of 20 years for the 1988 Seoul Games – of hosting the Paralympics alongside the Olympic Games, setting them in the same city and utilising the same state of the art facilities. The Paralympics had already extended beyond their initial concentration on wheelchair-based events, but the establishment of the IPC brought a focus on the normalisation of Paralympic sport and the expansion of its media profile. In Ireland, too, there was organisational change with the establishment of a Paralympic Council of Ireland in 1987 (rebranded Paralympics Ireland in 2005) to assume management of Paralympic preparations from a trio of disability-based organisations: the Irish Wheelchair Association Sport, Irish Blindsport and Celebral Palsy Sport Ireland.

While the proportion of female participants was slow to increase and media attitudes slow to shift, Paralympic sport did significantly expand from the 1990s onwards, transitioning as it did away from a focus on participation towards an elite, high performance culture. For many observers, however, the 2012 London Games were a watershed moment. No sooner had a hugely successful Olympics ended than billboards sprung up across the city declaring, “Thanks for the warm-up”. In terms of access, participation, media profile and attendance, the 2012 Paralympics marked a significant advance on anything previously experienced.

For Irish Paralympians, those London Games helped catapult gold medal winners like Jason Smyth, Michael McKillop and Mark Rohan into the mainstream of public consciousness, establishing a trend where the top Paralympians who came after, such as Ellen Keane, attained national profiles that transcended the typical audiences for their sport.

1924-2024 – The Return to Paris

In the 21st century, the Olympics Games and Paralympics belong within a select category considered mega-sporting events. They are colossal in every sense. Super-sized and spectacular, they take-over host cities and command global television and social media audiences for a spread of sports that, for a short number of weeks ever four years, seizes the public imagination and carries the potential to transform the individual lives of thousands of athletes from over 200 countries.

The transformations experienced by both Olympic and Paralympic Games have been driven by activist campaigns for better and more equal representation, by improvements in sports science and specialised programmes for athlete development, and by the globalising forces of commerce, media and technology. Their combined effect means that, in terms of organisation, participation, competition levels and global reach, Paris 2024 will serve up a sporting showpiece that would have been beyond the wildest imaginations of those who, one hundred years ago, gathered in the same city for their own Olympic experience.

The cultural competitions that delivered Ireland its only two medals at Paris 1924 are long gone as a feature of the Olympic experience, but the Irish Olympic and Paralympic teams that competes at Paris 2024 will be far bigger and much better supported by the State than the pioneering selection of a century before. Furthermore, these teams, in both their athlete composition and the breadth of sports they cover, are representative of a more diverse Irish society and its rich and varied sporting culture.

After a passage of one hundred years, therefore, it is not only a very different Olympic experience that returns to Paris, but a radically transformed Ireland that will be represented.

Exhibition curator: Mark Duncan