A century ago, sports rises from ravages of war and disease

The world in 1919 was hardly a place for fun and games.

A war like no other had ravaged Europe, killing untold millions and leaving the continent devastated. The Spanish Flu pandemic was waning but still wreaking its horrors, with some 50 million people dead worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States.

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. There was golf and tug of war, and a black American was a big star, 17 years before Jesse Owens stared down Adolf Hitler in Berlin.

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 phenom 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.

The stadium not only sat 25,000 but had dressing rooms, showers and a special bungalow built for Pershing to host friends and dignitaries with a private entrance to the stadium.

"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."
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."
Off the field, the hottest spot was the YMCA Inter-Allied Hut, which quickly drew the name "the melting pot."
France finished second in the medal count, though a colonel writing about the games noted that the country would have done better "had not a large percentage of its army been killed or wounded in the war."
American Norman Ross was the biggest winner, with five gold medals in swimming. Ross would go on to win three gold the next year in the Olympics. Solomon Butler, a student at the University of Dubuque, won the long jump, and accounts of the time described gasps and "loud cheers for the American Negro."