The first Olympic Games held in Paris, in 1900, were an afterthought—a supplement to the Exposition Universelle, the giant World’s Fair. The inaugural modern Olympics had taken place in Athens, four years earlier, and the founder of the modern Games, a Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin, imagined that the second iteration could be part of an exhibit at the fair designed to evoke the original Olympics, in ancient Greece. There, among the grand displays of Art Noveau and contemporary innovations—dry-cell batteries, the moving sidewalk—he proposed that one would find replicas of stadiums, temples, and gymnasiums, not to mention the athletes, living monuments to classical ideals of physical and spiritual excellence.
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