Allez les Jeux! A sporting tour of Paris

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Paris

Victorian Britons codified the modern versions of most sports but didn’t see the point of playing them against foreigners. That’s why most international sports competitions were invented in Paris. Many of these contests — 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 histories, while the new Aquatics Centre is a model sports venue for the green era. It all calls for a sporting tour of Paris.

The first leg of the journey will take us to various spots inside the city itself — all of them easily covered by bike or metro. We’ll then travel five minutes north by RER suburban train to Seine-Saint-Denis, the disadvantaged département that will be the heart of the Games. The longer trip to Versailles is only for the keenest.       

Birthplace of the modern Olympics

We’ll start in the Grand Amphithéâtre of Sorbonne University, where in June 1894 a small Parisian with a big moustache, 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 Olympics. “It is given to us,” the 31-year-old explained to them, in the then universal language of French, “to meet in this great city of Paris, whose rejoicings and anxieties are shared by the world, so that one could call her its nervous centre.” 

Having sat in that magnificent auditorium and struggled with its acoustics, I wonder how many of them heard him. Still, his claim, at that time, was a platitude. Of course the delegates were meeting in the Navel of the World. Of course they were listening to a Frenchman who was trying to civilise them. The delegates voted for Coubertin’s proposal, as he later wrote, “chiefly to please me”. Website; Directions

Birthplace of the Tour de France

Twenty minutes north by bike or taxi from the Sorbonne (or 30 minutes by metro) is the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre. Here, one November lunchtime in 1902, in a now-vanished brasserie called Zimmer, a reporter on L’Auto newspaper suggested to the editor that they invent a cycling race around France. The editor gave a time-honoured Parisian response: “For me, it’s a no.” The newspaper’s financier created the Tour de France anyway. Directions

Birthplace of Fifa and football’s World Cup

Cycle south-west to 229 Rue Sainte-Honoré. In an office on the courtyard here in May 1904, seven men, including the French grocer’s son Jules Rimet, founded the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, Fifa. Rimet would later become its president and create football’s World Cup. Directions

Birthplace of motor sports

From the Rue Saint-Honoré, walk ten minutes south-west to Place de la Concorde, an Olympic venue this summer for the “urban” sports of BMX freestyle, skateboarding, breakdancing and three-on-three basketball. At Concorde, find the mansion flying the flag of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). A month after Rimet et al founded Fifa, posh automobile enthusiasts set up the FIA here and began writing the international rules for motor-racing. Directions

Then it’s on to the most noteworthy Olympic venues, starting with the main Olympic stadium (below), in Seine-Saint-Denis, five minutes north of Paris by suburban RER train from Gare du Nord station. 

Stade de France

This national stadium was built for the football World Cup of 1998. Its most famous night remains France’s 3-0 victory over Brazil in that year’s final, with Zinedine Zidane heading two goals. The Stade was built with an athletics track, with a view of one day serving as an Olympic stadium. That moment will finally come when it hosts the rugby, athletics, Para athletics and the closing ceremony.

An office district arose around it. The plan was to regenerate impoverished Seine-Saint-Denis. But today, the concrete stadium beside the A1 motorway, with only soulless office towers for neighbours, looks like a traffic island in a 1990s dystopia. The Stade hasn’t regenerated Seine-Saint-Denis. The department remains the poorest in mainland France. Website; Directions

Aquatics Centre

The Stade de France is now being put to shame by a much smaller, tent-like structure that just opened across the motorway, connected by a footbridge: the Aquatics Centre, the only permanent sports facility built specifically for these Games. Its dipping roof, designed to reduce the distance from the top of the stands to the pool, is a wink to its bigger neighbour’s. Here is a state of the art 2020s building facing a state of the art 1990s one.                        

Comparing the two, you see the advance of green architecture. The Aquatics Centre is made largely of pinewood, and has a solar farm (one of France’s largest) on its roof. The plastic spectator seats around the pool were made in a nearby factory from bottletops and shampoo bottles, some of them collected by local schoolchildren. The centre was built by two female architects, Laure Mériaud and Cécilia Gross. Mériaud says: “Here we are in a building that says loudly, ‘It can be done differently.’”

Whereas the Stade was a statement of French grandeur, the Aquatics Centre has a neighbourhood feel. After hosting the Games’s swimming, water polo and diving events, the seating capacity around the main pool will be cut, creating space for sports such as padel and climbing, and the building will open to locals. The aim is to transform the office district around the two great sporting structures into a neighbourhood, with apartment blocks, trees and pedestrian streets. One 11-year-old in two in Seine-Saint-Denis cannot swim. They can learn in the Aquatics Centre. It will be “a place of life”, says Mériaud. Website; Directions

Lastly, any aficionado of sporting history should check out three other Olympic venues:

Yves-du-Manoir Stadium, Colombes

North-west of the city is the only 2024 venue that also did service at the Paris Olympics of 1924. Back then, it was the main stadium, site of the sprinting triumphs of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, immortalised in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. In 1938, Colombes hosted football’s World Cup final, won by Fascist Italy. This summer, it has the Olympic field hockey. Website; Directions

Roland-Garros’s clay tennis courts

Sitting in the leafy bourgeois 16th arrondissement of south-west Paris, the Roland-Garros complex, built in 1928, has witnessed the glories and disasters of modern France. When war began in 1939, the French government used the complex as a “provisional camp for the detention of ‘undesirable aliens’”, wrote Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian Jewish author who was interned here for 10 days. “We were housed in queer sorts of grottoes, under the great stand of the central tennis court.” 

After the Nazis took Paris, Roland-Garros returned to its original function of tennis with an annual tournament. Rafael Nadal won 14 French Opens here. This summer, the complex will also host Olympic boxing. Website; Directions

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 modelled the first bikini, designed by automobile engineer Louis Réard, in 1946. Bernardini is still around, aged 96.

Palace of Versailles

The most beautiful venue of the Games will not be in Paris itself. The Palace of Versailles, an RER suburban-train journey away from the capital, will host the equestrian and modern pentathlon events in its sumptuous grounds. If you visit, do pop around the corner to the little Royal Tennis Court, where pre-revolutionary courtiers played “jeu de paume”, tennis’s ancestor.

The deputies of the Third Estate gathered in this building on June 20 1789, weeks before the French Revolution, and swore the “Tennis Court Oath”: they would stay together until they had secured a written constitution for France. In Paris, all sporting history is made on top of layers of past history. Website; Directions

What’s your favourite Parisian sporting venue, and will you be in or visiting the city during the Olympics? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter

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