Patiala, 11 April (Shahi)
Cricket at the Olympics: Great Britain Defeats France for Gold at Paris 1900
The first cricket match at the Olympics in 1900 featured two fifties and two five-wicket hauls.
A total of just 366 runs were scored across four innings, yet this low-scoring Test match from the 1900 Olympic Games holds a unique place in sporting history.
Played over two days between Great Britain and France, it is remembered as the inaugural cricket match in Olympic history.
Unlike the usual 22 players, this game saw 24 cricketers take the field, with neither team featuring players who represented their national sides.
This was notable given that England had been playing Test matches against Australia since 1877.
Coincidentally, the Paris Test in 1900 was the only international cricket match played that year.
However, it does not qualify as a first-class match since it wasn’t an 11-a-side contest and was scheduled for only two days.
How Cricket Came to the Paris 1900 Olympics
Although there were plans to include cricket in the first Athens Olympics in 1896, it was dropped due to insufficient participation. The sport finally debuted four years later in 1900.
In 1900, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium were set to compete in cricket, but the latter two withdrew after their bids to co-host the Games fell through.
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As a result, the match at the Vélodrome de Vincennes, a cycling venue, played on August 19 and 20 between Great Britain (referred to as England in flyers at the time) and France became the final.
Originally, the match was promoted as part of the 1900 Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair.
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The European teams played what is now recognized as a Test match, with each side batting twice over two days—unlike the modern five-day Tests—after an agreement between the captains allowed 12 players per team to bat.
Consequently, an extra name was handwritten onto the printed scorecards.
Low-Scoring Olympic Cricket Match
Neither team fielded a national cricket squad. Great Britain was represented by the Devon and Somerset Wanderers club, who were touring France at the time and were invited to Paris for the Olympics.
Their opponents, a team called All Paris, consisted of 12 players, mostly British expatriates.
Of the 24 players who took the field over the two days, only two had first-class cricket experience.
Great Britain’s Alfred Bowerman and Montagu Toller, both of whom had played for Somerset, delivered the standout batting and bowling performances of the match, respectively.
Great Britain won the first Olympic cricket match—albeit with just five minutes remaining on the second day—by 158 runs, as France managed only 104 runs throughout the game.
Interestingly, the winning team received silver medals, while France was awarded bronze, with both teams also given miniature Eiffel Tower replicas.
These medals were later upgraded to gold and silver, respectively, and the event was officially recognized as an Olympic competition in 1912.
Great Britain’s captain Charles Beachcroft and Alfred Bowerman were the only batsmen to score fifties in the match, both in the second innings, while bowlers Frederick Christian’s seven-wicket haul in the first innings and Montagu Toller’s 7/9 in the second dismantled the French side.
Cricket was scheduled for the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, the first time the USA hosted the Games. However, it was removed from the final event list due to insufficient participation.
Since then, the sport has appeared in three other multi-sport events. It was played in the 50-over format at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and featured as a women’s Twenty20 competition at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
At the Asian Games, cricket has been contested in the T20 format, with men’s and women’s events held across three editions. In Hangzhou, these matches were granted international status.
