It was in Colombes... a hundred years before Versailles!

From 1895 to 1943, Le  Sport Universel illustré , a weekly sports paper as its name suggests, was the equivalent of what the daily newspaper L'Équipe is today. But while this newspaper now devotes a quarter of its content to football, as required by Universal Sport, at the beginning of the 20th century it was horses - racing and riding - that accounted for the bulk of its pages, often more than half. It was the era of the “sportsmen”.

Sixteen different sports made up the programme for the VIII Olympic Games, which began on 26 June with fencing and ended a month later with yachting (in Meulan and Le Havre), cycling (Colombes and Vincennes) and horse riding (Colombes). Today, Paris 2024, the thirty-third edition, will host forty-three of them.

This is certainly a step forward, but not so much as far as equestrian sports are concerned. A century ago, after hosting saddle horse and polo events at previous editions, the programme was limited to the three disciplines we still know today: the Equestrian Championship, the forerunner of eventing, dressage, which is more or less equivalent to the format we know today, and show jumping (note that at the time, show jumping was spelt with an ‘s’ at the end, whereas nowadays it is spelt without an ‘s’, considering that it is the exercise of jumping over several obstacles... Semantics!

It is undoubtedly the format of the Equestrian Championship, heir to the Knights' Horse Championship and therefore to today's eventing, that has evolved the most, particularly after a dressage event in which the details of the rounds are not mentioned but from which we learn that the Netherlands distinguished itself (already!).

To begin with, as regards the Equestrian Championship, as reported in the edition of 4 July 1924, a good 7-kilometre drive through the Bois de Boulogne before entering the Auteuil racecourse, temple of the steeplechase. And not just to hang around!   A total of 4,000m over a course based on the classic racecourse obstacles “including the finishing hurdle, the bull-finch, the double bar, the embankment, the pavilion hurdle, the Chênes hurdle, the brook, the river of eight (which is no longer NDLA), the reverse embankment hurdle, the oxer and again the bull-finch and the final hurdle”.   A little further on in Florimond's report we find this comment: “The steeplechase at Auteuil was generally very well done. Some horses were impeccable jumpers. There were a few slip-ups, a few accidents [...]”. But that's not where the difficulties end.   Not for the best!   “A 15-kilometre stretch of road took them through the Bois de Fausses Reposes (sic) to the Bois de Villebon, where the cross-country event was held.   This time it was 8,000m “with the jumping of the Patte d'Oie obstacles (embankment, hedge, tree trunk, open ditch, Irish bench), ditches, up-hills and down-hills, and to finish, two kilometres at a free pace on the Villacoublay airfield”.

So, at the start, “the horses on show were particularly admired; they were all beautiful animals, brought in in impeccable condition”. At the finish, our journalist conceded: “the cross-country, despite the very hard and slippery terrain, gave rise to few incidents, but on arriving at Villacoublay, most of the horses were stiff, and some were even limping badly”.

All that remained was to conclude the adventure, as we do today, with a show jumping test: “the show jumping course was run at the stadium (in Colombes NDLA) over twelve well-made, high jumping obstacles measuring around 1.10 m; it was used to prove that, after the hard ride on the eve, the horses had retained enough suppleness and vigour to jump correctly”.   It is worth noting that the format of the Equestrian Championships had taken into account the need to let the horses “breathe” after the cross-country event, which at the Paris 2024 Games, in the Parc du Château de Versailles, will be run over a cross-country course that is only... half a dozen thousand metres long.

As for the jumping, the competition still known as the “Prix des Nations” prompted this comment from our columnist: “The battle was truly splendid between exceptional jumpers, ridden by off-line riders”.   And we ask ourselves: what has really changed here?

The technical difficulties, perhaps. “The course was particularly tough, with all the high obstacles - oxers, bars, triple bars, gates, road crossings, walls, etc - measuring 1.40m (now 1.60m).   All those in width: river, brook, etc... 4 metres (today hardly more, even less). The Pau embankment completed the course, which comprised sixteen obstacles and more than a thousand metres. Unfortunately, the ground was very slippery, which prevented some fine jumpers from doing what was expected of them.   After a few jumps, they no longer dared to give themselves up and stole or knocked over. There were a few falls, but all were not serious”.

Specialists will appreciate this. Others may wonder what the podium looked like at the end of this jumping competition. After a few apologies linked to the condition of the course “the appalling ground at Colombes - quicksand - on slippery grass is no doubt the reason for the poor performances by these four horses, who had accustomed us to appearing in a very different light”, we really liked the statement: “For the moment, let's be satisfied with recording this defeat, which is too complete to be strictly accurate”. Nice, isn't it?  And to conclude with the glorious and universally illustrated uncertainty of sporting verdicts: “Like the turf, the horse show has its glorious uncertainty” ... Camus, to whom the quotation is readily attributed, was only eleven years old!

Les VIII^e jeux olympiques, les jeux équestres

Xavier Libbrecht