Sporting event born from the ravages of war, disease

The Spanish Flu pandemic was waning but still wreaking its horrors, with some 50 million people dead worldwide, including 675,000 in the US.

But hundreds of thousands of troops from various countries were still in Europe. The war was over but they were bored, with little to do until the time came to be shipped home.And so was born an international competition like no other. The Inter-Allied Games would bring together nations weary of war in some traditional — and not so traditional — sports.

A century before the Tokyo Olympics were postponed as coronavirus spread across the earth, sports helped in the healing.Italians played basketball for the first time, while Americans won medals by throwing grenades like the baseballs they tossed at home. Fourteen countries competed on the outskirts of Paris, including a team from the Kingdom of Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia) that brought four camels used in the opening parade. Women were not invited to compete, but French tennis phenomenon Suzanne Lenglen — who would win her first Wimbledon title the next month — played demonstrations and beat every man she met on the other side of the net.

And it was all done in a stadium built in 90 days — mostly by American troops — and named after Gen John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.

“Here were these people who came together in the spirit of sport and really showed that it could be a healing property,” said Doran Cart, senior curator of the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. “They wanted to continue the feeling of camaraderie with the allied nations and keep the troops occupied. Sports were seen really as an activity everybody could take part in.”

All the competitors were amateurs, as was the order of the day, and collected small medals as their prizes.

Though ostensibly an international competition, the games had a distinctly American flavour. They were the brainchild of Elwood S Brown, who headed athletics for both the American Army in Europe and the YMCA. Brown saw them as a way to keep troops out of trouble after the war was over while showing that America was as good on the playing field as it was on the battlefield.

In a 1918 letter proposing the games, Brown said they would be a way of “demonstrating to our allied friends America’s best in sport, her great play spirit and incidentally her finest in physical manhood.” Indeed, Americans built the stadium, won most of the medals, and even fed the other competitors with military rations left over from the war that had ended in an armistice just eight months earlier. Just to make sure the US team was loaded, about 40 athletes who never served in the war were put on a ship to France to compete in their specialties. They joined 1,000 other athletes and 7,000 troops from various countries in a mini-Olympics that drew big crowds. After years of war, they competed in the day and socialised at night.

The games would be a one-off, though there was an attempt at the end of World War II to hold a similar competition. They are largely forgotten today, and the site of Pershing Stadium is used for baseball games now.

“People were tired and they just wanted to go home,” Cart said. “Everyone had enough of war and the games quickly became just a footnote.”