How the 1924 Olympic stadium is still in use for the 2024 games

Analysis: Stade de Colombes is the only facility from 100 years ago that will host events at this summer's games in Paris

By Ruadhán Cooke, University of Galway

The opening ceremony of this year's Olympic Games will take place on the River Seine in the centre of the French capital. Paris previously hosted the second Games of the modern era on the fringes of the Universal Exhibition of 1900, and again in the summer of 1924.

On the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Games, the first Olympics at which a 48-strong team of 46 men and 2 women from the recently independent Irish Free State competed as Ireland, what tangible legacy of the Games immortalised in the film Chariots of Fire endures? What remains of the stadium lit up by the exploits of British athletes Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell and the Flying Finn, Paavo Nurmi?

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From Olympics, Paavo Nurmi, the nine-time Olympic champ you've probably never heard of

In light of the burgeoning popular interest in the coverage of sporting events, the national daily newspaper Le Matin developed the Stade du Matin stadium in 1907 in the northwestern Parisian suburb of Colombes on the site of a horse racing track first opened in 1883. Racing Club de France, a socially exclusive multi-sports club founded in 1882, acquired the lease to the renamed Stade de Colombes in 1919, by which time it had already become a leading venue for athletics meetings and football and rugby matches. France was admitted to rugby's Five Nations Championship in 1910