Motor Racing Was an Olympic Sport 124 Years Ago. Here’s What It Was Like.

Unless some very creative cyclists manage to cheat, there will be no motors in the 2024 Paris Olympics. When Paris hosted the games in 1900, however, it included one of the most dangerous and exciting forms of nation-against-nation competition: car racing.

It was a time when there weren’t many cars, period, and those who owned them were rich amateurs competing with the very newest and fastest machines on the planet. Imagine various millionaires and billionaires piloting rockets against each other and you have a good sense of the vibe.

In 1900, France had the most cars, the fastest cars, and the fastest drivers. As a country it had just won the first international car racing championship, the inaugural Gordon Bennet Cup, not that there was much competition. Five teams entered. Three were French. As for the 1900 Olympic games, there was one major auto race, and it was won by a French driver in a French car.

Cars were a big deal, and practically kicked off the games in May, the only event before them being fencing. Multiple large halls of the Exposition Universelle, also known as the 1900 Paris Exposition, or the world’s fair, were crammed full of cars, mostly French, attracting scores of visitors. The Olympic Games tacked onto it, and while there is some dispute about whether the car races count as official Olympic events, the International Olympic Committee notes that the 1900 games “under-promoted their Olympic status to such an extent that many athletes never knew they had actually participated in the Olympic Games.” No one knew what the Olympics were just yet, in other words, in every event.

The Expo, meanwhile, featured a series of rolling demonstrations for various cars and trucks, and also motorcycle demos, including an egg race, and spoons held in teeth.

The big car race of the 1900 Games was from Paris to Toulouse and back. All the major races of the time followed this city-to-city format, testing both car and driver. Racers (with riding mechanics) set off individually with gaps between them, though one shouldn’t get the impression that this was a well-organized event. The route was only certified a few days before takeoff, and a last-minute change to the starting line left many spectators stranded in the wrong part of Paris.

The first day had drivers run a grueling 458 miles to Toulouse, with speeds neutralized in villages by a cyclist pacing each car through town. The second day was a kind of rest day/car show, and the third day was the race to return. Sources differ on how many cars entered, but the contemporary report in The Horseless Age counts 76 entries across three classes: voitures (cars), voiturettes (small cars), and motorcycles. It only lists a handful of finishers: seven cars, five motorcycles, and one voiturette, a testament to the brutality of guiding these machines down unpaved roads. This is a different tally than in the 1998 history The 1900 Olympic Games: results for all competitors in all events, with commentary, by Bill Mallon (seven, seven, and three, respectively). The 2000 book Les Jeux olympiques oubliés: Paris 1900, by André Drevon, disagrees again, counting 55 entrants and eighteen finishers (at eight, seven, and three). All agree on the winners, at least, though they disagree on times.

Doubtless, it was the French racing great Alfred Veghle, who competed under the anagrammatic pseudonym Levegh, who finished first. He won in a Mors, a rather sharp two-seater with a startling 24 horsepower. He completed the course in 26 hours, 44 minutes, and 18 seconds according to that contemporary race report, or 20 h, 50 m, and 9 seconds according to both Mallon and Drevon. Multiple sources disagree about the precise length of the race itself, and Mallon doesn’t bother to mention the distance at all. He files the entire race under “Other Sports – Non-Olympic Status” and includes a brief rant that the drivers ought to be excluded for being professionals. This is nonsense, in part because motor racing was on the official program but also because these were all gentlemen drivers competing either for sport or to promote their own car companies.

Such was the case for Louis Renault, who won the voiturette class in a car of his own design with an impressive time of 40 hours, 27 minutes, 6 seconds. Or it was 40 hours, 27 minutes, 40 seconds (Mallon), or 34 hours, 33 minutes, 28 seconds (Drevon). His car was far less powerful than Levegh’s Mors, 3 horsepower against 24, but the Renault was more modern with such features as a transmission with gears, not chains and wheels made out of metal not wood. Everyone seemed amazed that such a delicate and light car (just 1,180 pounds loaded up) survived the route.

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Two of the three Renault brothers entered, actually. The second one was Marcel, who crashed into a wagon shortly before reaching Toulouse. He was uninjured, but people were already starting to worry that road races were getting too dangerous. Just below a column debating legal questions titled “Running Down Children,” The Horseless Age recounted, “Several of the competitors avowed their unwillingness to compete again in so exhausting an event; and it is possible, if not probably, that long-distance racing may die a natural death rather than suffer actual suppression at the hands of the authorities.” Indeed, it was not quite three years later that Marcel crashed and died at the infamous Paris-Madrid race, one of an estimated death toll of a dozen, counting both drivers and spectators.

That crash ended the era of the great city-to-city races, and auto racing never returned to the Olympics. It was a moment of brief but impressive overlap, relevant but quickly obscured.

It would be easy to say that the Olympics were fairly young in 1900, and to dismiss auto racing as an errant kind of event, quickly weeded out of the Games. 1900 was only the second Olympics of the modern era, first sketched out in 1894 and first held in 1896 in Athens.

But back in 1900 auto racing was an ultra-modern sport for the rich, it was already getting nationalistic, and it made the French look good. Of course, it would end up in the Paris Olympics. We should think of its inclusion alongside other particularly French events of those 1900 Games like Boules, a French version of lawn bowling, Arbalète, a French kind of crossbow shooting, and, spectacularly, hot air balloon racing. The French were way out on that.