Bringing Marathon to Paris: The Press and the Promotion of Endurance Running in the Belle Epoque

This chapter explores the development of marathon and other forms of endurance running in the French capital at the turn of the century. It demonstrates how the press played a leading role in bringing the sport to France following the success of the Marathon-Athens road race at the 1896 Olympics. It examines how tow dailies, Le Petit Journal and Le Vélo, through their conceptualization and organization of the first Paris marathons, sought to emulate and better the race that journalists had first witnessed during the first modern Olympic games. The chapter also examines how race coverage (including its build-up) emphasized the event as an opportunity for both mass participation and mass spectatorship, considering how coverage transformed readers’ perception of the urban landscape, allowing them to conceive of its streets as spaces in which sport and leisure coalesced and could be performed. It also considers the extent to which modern marathon running, as first conceived and reported in Belle Epoque France, also drew upon that other sporting spectacle that regularly transformed the streets of Paris into a race track and site of mass sporting spectatorship: road cycling. In so doing, it reveals the challenges and contradictions faced by organisers who sought to promote public participation in sport through elite sport. It concludes by arguing that, ultimately, the first Paris marathons helped to construct endurance running as the preserve of a narrowly defined form of sporting masculinity.