Paris Olympics of 1924 saved the Games. Can this be repeated?

Paris 1924 was the sixth and last Olympics presided over by Baron de Coubertin, the modern movement’s founder. He had good reason to be pleased with his work. The French government had backed the enterprise, providing a budget of 20m francs and a new stadium. The Olympic rituals – the parade of nations, the rings, the oath, gold, silver and bronze medals – had been established.

Above all, the Games remained the preserve of amateur athletic gentlemen – aristocrats, college kids and military officers – performing what the baron eulogised as “a display of manly virtue”.

But therein lay a problem. At the 1920 Antwerp Games, the public had stayed away from the amateur efforts of the gentlemen athletes, swimmers, gymnasts and the rest. The exclusion of women had led to the creation of a new movement, which had staged its own women’s Olympics every year since 1921. The workers’ sports movement, 4 million strong across the industrialised world, would stage its own inaugural Workers’ Olympics in Frankfurt in 1925, attracting 250,000 participants. And professional sports – baseball, boxing, cycling and football – were creating spectacles and celebrity that no Olympian could match.

The significance of Paris 1924 was that it offered a sporting riposte to the growing challenges.

Women made up less than 5% of the 3,000 athletes in Paris and were permitted to compete only in swimming, diving and tennis. But for the first time they grabbed some headlines and reshaped perceptions.

The American Sybil Bauer, for example, smashed the men’s world record in the 440-yard (400-metre) backstroke prior to the Paris Games, and across America there were calls for her to take on the men at the Olympics. It didn’t happen, but she took the women’s gold medal and broke the Olympic sprint record.

There were plenty of gentlemen athletes at the Games, but now they had challengers. American swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, born in Romania, grew up in the slums of Chicago before three gold medals in Paris and a turn in Hollywood as Tarzan took him to Beverly Hills.

Paris also featured the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, who ran six races in seven days, setting new records in most of them, and won five gold medals. He was depicted by the global press as the first superhuman athlete.

Today the Olympic movement faces challenges greater than in 1924: declining TV ratings, a lack of interest from the world’s youth, a track record of urban and environmental disasters. Today’s athletes are considerably more diverse, no less superhuman, and in the best of their performances, no less accomplished. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough for a second Paris Games to save the Olympics, but I doubt it.