Motorsport in the Olympics? The racing events that took place in the 1900 Olympic Games

The Summer Olympics are here again — and that means it’s time for motorsport fans around the globe to wonder what it would look like if car racing were included in the Olympics. Interestingly, motorsport already was included in the Olympics — sort of.

Back in 1900, 14 different racing events were included in and around that year’s Olympic Games. They’ve taken on something of an unofficial status in the record books, but perhaps it could serve as a template for what motorsport could look like in a future Olympics.

Fourteen unofficial Olympic races!

Let’s think back to 1900. At the turn of the 20th century, the automobile was a brand-new invention, and those early cars were slow, unreliable, and also a little unseemly.

If you owned a car, you were either a very rich amateur with high-speed dreams, or you had built that machine by hand — either by inventing some new technology, or by cobbling together various bits of existing technologies until you’d created something new.

At the time, France was the home of rampant innovation. The country had colonized countries around the world with the intention of gathering those countries’ resources — resulting in innovations in mining, manufacturing, and more (albeit at the cost of the countries France had invaded).

Suddenly, there was a glut of new materials and new machines that could be toyed with and transformed into new technologies — such as the automobile. Early races were staged from Paris to Rouen, or over certain courses like the Gordon Bennett Cup.

All that innovation was on full display alongside international competition in 1900 — the Olympic Games were hosted in Paris that year, and it took place in the throes of the Exposition Universelle, or, a world fair designed to showcase the fact that France was a leader in industry and modernization.

The fact that the World’s Fair and the Olympics took place in the same place at the same time has resulted in a little bit of confusion. See, it isn’t fully clear whether or not the automobile events took place as part of the World’s Fair, or as part of the Olympics.

That’s in part because the International Olympic Committee has admitted that it “under-promoted their Olympic status to such an extent that many athletes never knew they had actually participated in the Olympic Games” in 1900.

Effectively, that meant that there were a ton of sporting competitions going on in and around Paris to coincide with the 1900 Olympic Games, but it was a little bit of a mystery as to whether or not the event you were competing in was an Olympic competition or not. Because medals weren’t awarded to victors at the time, that further raises confusion.

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Nevertheless, racing happened within the 1900 Olympic timeline. The 14 different racing events were also massively diverse: there were five events for touring cars, two events for small cars, two events for taxis, two events for delivery vans, two for trucks, and two endurance races. On top of that were two motorcycle events — one standard race, and one endurance race.

The crowning event out of these 14 races was the Paris-Toulouse-Paris endurance event. On day one, competitors sped the 458 miles to Toulouse, where they were granted a nice day of rest. Then, on day three, they’d zip back to Paris in hopes of winning the race.

Sources disagree on the total number of entries, the total number of finishers, and the times of those finishers — but they do agree on the finishing order. The Paris-Toulouse-Paris race was won by Alfred Velghe, who raced under the pseudonym Levegh.

(If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Veghle’s nephew Pierre took on the Levegh surname when he began racing. Levegh was, of course, the driver behind the wheel of the Mercedes-Benz that killed over 80 spectators at the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans).

Louis Renault of Renault automotive fame won the voiturette class in a car he had designed himself; brother Marcel Renault also entered the race but crashed before finishing the event.

Medals and other prizes were awarded to many of the competitors, and cash prizes were also provided to the victors of the Paris-Toulouse-Paris race.

The cash prizes are one of the several reasons why these racing events hold a tentative place in Olympic history. Professionals are barred from competing in the Olympics, and accepting prize money constitutes professionalism.

Further, even though there seemed to be no actual rules limiting participation from other nations, almost every single entrant in all of the motorsport events was French. The only non-French starter in the voiture class of the Paris-Toulouse-Paris race was British driver Selwyn Edge, racing a British Napier.

Fascinatingly, motorsport wasn’t the only one-off competitor in the Olympics. Fishing, hot air ballooning, underwater swimming, and live-game target shooting were among some of the other sports to only appear in the 1900 Paris Olympics, and never again.

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