Paris: 100 Years Ago | Part One A century ago, in Paris, Stanford made its mark at the Summer Games—with moxie, medals, and a little bit of mayhem.

Last Fandango in Paris

Eager to kick off the Olympics in style, the French all but begged the United States to send a rugby team to Paris in 1924. Against all odds, the Americans had beaten them for gold in the 1920 Games, a humiliating defeat that—four years later—offered the French an enticing upside. A rematch in front of a revenge-hungry home crowd would be the perfect way for the hosts to begin the Games avec fracas.

There was just one hitch. In the four years since the last Summer Olympics, Americans had essentially forgotten rugby existed. A special invitation was in order. “The entire French community is awaiting your response, which, if negative, will result in deep disappointment and sadness,” the French Olympic Committee wrote to its American counterpart in September 1923. The Gallic guilt trip worked. Newspapers were soon spreading word that tryouts for a U.S. rugby team would begin that December. 

By the time the 22 U.S. team members—including nine current and former Stanford players—docked at Boulogne-sur-Mer on April 28, the warmth of the invitation was nowhere to be found. The French Olympic Committee failed to appear at the port upon the arrival of the Americans, the first U.S. contingent to have reached France. Authorities seized their luggage and denied them entry. The athletes, seasick from the rough voyage, reacted as if they were already facing their opponent. “They said we couldn’t get off the boat, we didn’t have any visas,” Norman Cleaveland, Class of 1923, one of the team’s (speedy) backs, recalled seven decades later. “So we said, ‘That’s what you think.’ We charged through the gendarmes and through the barriers.” The U.S. consul eventually untangled the mess, but the “Battle of Boulogne” was just the beginning. The Americans’ quest for rugby gold in 1924 would go down as one of the most controversial in Olympic history. The result, in the words of rugby historian Tony Collins, was “arguably the biggest shock ever in world rugby.”

The Pitch

It is somewhat misleading to talk about the American team representing the United States. There was really only one state involved. Even the team’s coach referred to them as the “California rugby team.” And no entity was more central to California’s unique relationship with rugby than Stanford. In 1906, Stanford and Cal had imported the “English game” to California after a nationwide spike in deaths had made football seem untenable. While a violent sport itself, rugby had rules, such as a ban on blocking, that avoided early 20th-century football’s mauling mass plays, the culprits behind much of the carnage. Schools across the state, from Santa Clara College to the University of Southern California, soon joined the scrum.

USC would return to football in 1914, Cal a year later, but Stanford students voted in 1916 to stick to rugby. Then, in the fall of 1918, World War I put the university largely under control of the U.S. Army, which considered football a better outlet for future fighting men. In 1918, orders were issued to revert to the gridiron, a decision that would prove permanent even as civilian rule of campus returned. The U.S. team that went to the 1920 Olympics—nearly half from the Farm—was essentially the California rugby experiment’s last hurrah. Even their surprising gold medal in Antwerp stirred little new interest in the sport, least of all at Stanford, where a new 60,000-seat football stadium soon testified to the changed order. “Rugby passed away almost unnoticed last quarter,” an article in the Stanford Daily from January 1923 noted. “The sport that for 1906 until 1918 held undisputed sway during each fall quarter on the Stanford campus . . . had but a few mourners at its funeral. This is the first year since the rugby game was taken up in 1906 that the old English sport has not been played on the Farm.”

With no new collegiate rugby stars, the 1924 U.S. team was drawn from a ragtag collection of relics—who had hardly touched a rugby ball since the last Olympics—and rookies recruited from football. Their obvious shortcomings likely helped explain the French appetite to play them. “France was very insistent that the title-holder enter a team so that she might be given the opportunity to remove the laurel wreath from the crown of her dear brothers from the USA,” wrote Dudley DeGroot, Class of 1924, MA ’29, PhD ’41, a hulking former captain of the Stanford football team, who was new to rugby. Cleaveland was blunter: “They were looking for a punching bag.” The Californians intended to punch back. They practiced through the spring, then embarked to England for a series of warm-up matches. They lost two of three games but kept the scores respectable. One of the English players suffered a broken leg in the third game, evidence of the fact the Americans could compensate with force for what they lacked in skill.

For several reasons—including that Wales, England, and Scotland had a long history of competing as separate teams, and that English rugby leaders generally saw the Olympics as the wrong venue for the game—Britain did not send a rugby team to Paris. In allegiance, neither did Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the southern powers associated with the British Empire. In fact, besides the United States and France, the only rugby team in Paris in 1924 was Romania, whose lack of experience all but assured a gold medal rematch between the Americans and the French. 

Goals

Winning still seemed a long shot. The French were in their own backyard, fielding players honed against Europe’s best. The U.S. athletes were 5,600 miles from home, and they were beset by a sense of being unwanted. “Many times we were treated with open hostility,” the U.S. team manager wrote to American officials, claiming the French used their control of local fields to stop the Americans from scrimmaging. There were reports of U.S. players being spit at on the street. And when they hopped a fence topped with barbed wire to finally get in a practice at the main stadium, their locker room was cleaned out by thieves. During the U.S. rout of Romania, the French crowd booed the Americans with a vehemence that stunned the players, not least because only six years had passed since U.S. troops had helped the French win World War I. “Why they harboured such an open hatred for a nation who had done so much for them will never be understood by the members of the American rugby team,” DeGroot wrote.

The French grievances were layered. The U.S. team’s reaction at the port had gone over badly, and their manager had publicly battled over everything from filming rights to who’d referee the game. Plus, the U.S. intervention in the war and subsequent peace wasn’t cause for universal hosannas. “The Americans were not regarded as heroes for bringing France her liberty,” author Mark Ryan writes in his 2009 book, For the Glory: Two Olympics, Two Wars, Two Heroes, a deeply sourced account of the 1924 U.S. team. “They were a reminder of recent French weakness.” But a major antagonism was the style of American rugby itself—more football-like violence, less rugby-like skill. “As for the method employed, it is that of the pugilist,” the French newspaper Le Petit Journal wrote, “always that of the pugilist.” 

That resentment reached fever pitch in the final after two French players, including the team’s star, fell to injury and the Americans surged into the lead. Soon 40,000 spectators weren’t only shrieking and whistling; some were trying to scale the fence to the field. Several American supporters were bludgeoned over the head with canes. “They were laying them out on the field, waiting for the ambulances to come. We thought that some were dead, and we thought that it was only a matter of time before we would be dead,” Cleaveland later said. The French players themselves joined the fray, punching and kicking U.S. players. When the United States team prevailed 17–3, fans nearly rioted. “An American photographer, while attempting to take a picture of the American flag at the top of the Olympic pole, was hit by various missiles thrown by the enraged spectators,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The headline “Booing Drowns ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ as Police Escort Victors from Field” topped the New York Times. “Perhaps it was fortunate that the poor sportsmanship of the French people did serve to advertise the American team, for without that publicity they might have fought and won, without recognition,” the United Press sports editor wrote, calling the win “the brightest entry that has been scored on all the pages of America’s international sports records.”

But back at Stanford, the news was greeted with a yawn. The Daily relegated the victory to the final sentence of a 1,000-word story more focused on Cleaveland’s time in England teaching British society “Give ’em the Axe.” It was almost as an afterthought that the article ended on page 2 with “Sunday they played their last game against the French team, whom they defeated by a score of 17 to 3, thereby winning the Olympic championships.” The paper’s earlier reports of rugby’s death on campus had apparently not been greatly exaggerated. 

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