IMAGE: Cricket has been included for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. {Photograph}: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Cricket and the Olympics made new bedfellows when the game featured in its list for the first and only time in the 1900 edition of the Paris games.
The French team that played in the final against Great Britain was made up of players working manually on the construction of the magnificent Eiffel Tower.
During the matches which lasted six months, the Olympic cricket program consisted of one match over two days, with a cumulative score of 366 runs in four innings.
The postscript was both humorous and frightening. Britain’s Devon Wanderers, after taking part in the ‘last Olympics’, traveled to their next holiday destination on a coach with two drivers.
The main driver was punch drunk and had to be removed from his seat, and the second driver was no good either. Intoxicated, he hit the car, causing minor accidents.
“Shambolic”
What was the match routine like? An article written by Daniel Schofield in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ a few years ago noted that the famous Olympic columnist, the late Ian Buchanan, who founded the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH), had referred to the cricket event as a games video as “chaotic”.
It took place at the Vélodrome de Vincennes, a cycle track with ridiculously short square boundaries, less than 30 meters from the center of the field.
If there were 24 people on the field, the documentation for that means that even 20 of them hadn’t watched that game over two days.
R Horne, H Terry, W Anderson, D Robinson, W Browning were weekend cricketers who shaped the French Sports Union, primarily for British expatriates living in France.
And what did they do for a living? Well, they built the Eiffel Tower. It’s no surprise that the French crew went all out for 26 chasing the 184 with no one reaching double figures.
While Great Britain received the silver medal for winning the final, the…
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