What would Olympic tennis players who competed in Paris 100 years ago say if they could see it all now?

Over the past two weeks, the world has seen a Paris that has been transformed for the Olympic Games. Athletes floated down the Seine during the Opening Ceremony, and are swimming in its (mostly) clean waters. Five glowing, multicolored Rings have been affixed to the Eiffel Tower’s 135-year-old iron girders. The brand-new breakdancing competition will be held at the Place de la Concorde; whatever you think of it as an Olympic sport, it does seem like an improvement over the guillotine that the locals erected on the same spot during the French Revolution.

By comparison, tennis players haven’t experienced much novelty in their surroundings at Roland Garros. But that’s only because the fabled facility has already undergone its own multi-million dollar renovation for the Games. It began in 2018, and includes a new center court with a retractable roof.

Which makes me wonder: What would the players who competed in Paris 100 years ago say if they could come back and see it all now?

If they had hunted for an uglier place for the Olympic Games, it could not have been found. Hazel Wightman

Hazel Wightman, an American tennis standout of the 1920s, would surely be more impressed by the 2024 Games than she was by the 1924 version. She summed up the general reaction to that year’s site this way: “If they had hunted for an uglier place for the Olympic Games, it could not have been found.”

The place she was referring to was Colombes, a less-than glamorous manufacturing zone on the north side of Paris, filled with factories and hard-scrabble dwellings. The tennis courts were set in the shadows of the main Olympic stadium—when those courts were finally constructed, that is. The U.S. team arrived to find an empty field, with red clay still in small mounds and pyramids across it. There was no place to practice, but the players could already tell it wasn’t going to be an ideal setting for physical activity. The tennis facility was set in a small valley that held the heat. And it was surprisingly, infernally hot that summer—upwards of 110 degrees on some days. The 10,000-meter race that took place on the nearby track resulted in a mass collapse of runners.

Once the courts were finished, the players confronted their next set of challenges: No water, no place to sit, and a locker room that was little more than a shed with a shower that sometimes worked. Ball kids tried to hide from the heat in the shadows, and occasionally refused to run out into the sun and pick up a ball. Linespeople were often no-shows, and in at least one match, line calls were collectively made by the spectators. When play did get underway, there were fights among the fans from various countries. One American was beaten by a Frenchman for the sin of overzealous cheering. Apparently, the Olympic spirit was only intermittently in evidence during the tennis competition that year.

Why was the sport so neglected? Paris, after all, was the home of the founder of the modern Games, Pierre de Coubertin, who was still the head of the IOC at the time. The 1924 Summer Olympics were conceived as a tribute to him and his vision, and they drew more than 3,000 athletes, the most to that point. This was the Olympics of Johnny Weissmuller, Paavo Nurmi and Chariots of Fire. But there was something, or someone, crucial missing from the tennis event: Suzanne Lenglen. The theory among the Americans was that, without their Goddess to worship, the French weren’t interested.

Lenglen had won gold in singles and mixed doubles four years earlier at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. She lost just four games in her five singles matches, and it was assumed that “The Great Lenglen”—as she had begun to refer to herself—would pick up where she left off in her native Paris. From 1920 to 1923, she won Wimbledon and the French Championships each year, and at 25 was at the peak of her powers. She was clearly the No. 1 player in the world, so much so that France’s sporting public didn’t believe any other woman should be ranked at all. To mention anyone else in the same conversation as the Goddess was an insult.

That spring, though, a fresh new face had appeared on Europe’s shores: 18-year-old California schoolgirl Helen Wills. “Little Miss Poker Face,” as she was christened by sportswriter Grantland Rice, had just finished her freshman exams at Cal-Berkeley—she was an art major—before setting off across the U.S. and the Atlantic. Despite her youth, Wills wasn’t an unknown quantity. The previous fall, at 17, she had won her first title at Forest Hills. After that victory, the U.S. press began to beat the drum for a Lenglen-Wills showdown. The assumption was that it would happen either at Wimbledon or the Olympics in 1924.

Lenglen may have heard those drums from across the ocean. While she was rolling through the spring Riviera circuit as usual, there were signs that all was not right. She was overweight, and on a crash diet. She was recovering from a bout of jaundice she had contracted during an exhibition tour in Spain. She exploded after a foot fault was called on her, refusing to play until the offending linesman was removed and the call rescinded—which they were. She didn’t defend her title at the French Championships.

What Lenglen did instead was come to see Wills play the Wightman Cup in England. To her relief, the “American Girl,” as Wills has been dubbed by a besotted British press, lost twice. The Goddess was seen smiling in the audience. She could eat again.

Lenglen’s renewed confidence carried her through the early rounds at Wimbledon; she won her first three matches 6-0, 6-0. But in the quarterfinals, Elizabeth Ryan, another top-level American, pushed Lenglen through three hard-fought sets. That was too much for her, and she withdrew from her semifinal, and from the Olympics. She cited the effects of jaundice, but many wondered if the thought of facing Wills in the Wimbledon final, and at the Games, was at the bottom of her decision. Wills’ coach from California, Pop Fuller, was among the skeptics. He said that Lenglen didn’t look like she had jaundice, but she did seem yellow.

There was one person on the U.S. tennis team who wasn’t flustered at all by the tennis facilities at the Olympic site: Helen Wills. A few weeks earlier, she had blown her first chance at a Wimbledon title after leading Kitty McKane of Great Britain 6-4, 4-1 in the final. “I saw the end before it arrived,” Wills said, echoing thousands of tennis players across the decades. But her first glimpse of Paris had made that disappointment feel like a distant memory.

“She was in heaven,” wrote Larry Engelmann, in his definitive account of the Lenglen-Wills rivalry, The Goddess and the American Girl. “She wandered alone around Paris sightseeing, visiting the museums, walking along the boulevards, browsing in the bookshops and galleries, worrying not at all about the tennis competition or any other events in the Games. She had fallen in love with Paris.”

When she did return to the courts, Wills found them much to her liking as well. The heat had dried the clay until they played much like the hard courts she grew up on in Northern California. She didn’t even mind the heat. Her trademark visor, large collar, and long skirt kept her safer from the sun than many of her more stylishly dressed colleagues and opponents.

“I’m in good condition and playing as well as I ever did,” she announced.

Wills wasn’t exaggerating. She sailed through her five Olympic singles matches with the loss of just 14 games. Again, Lenglen came to watch her, but this time she wasn’t as pleased with what she saw. When Wills pulled ahead of one of her opponents, Lenglen announced that it was too hot and left.

The gold-medal match, which pitted Wills against France’s Julie Vlasto, didn’t go off without a hitch. Vlasto forgot her credential, and the gatekeepers at the site wouldn’t let her onto the grounds. Finally, she had to push her way through. When she and Wills walked on court well after the scheduled starting time, they heard the boos and hisses that still rain down on tennis players in Paris today.

Before play began, some of Wills’ fellow Cal Bears in the audience broke into the school’s traditional “Oski Yell,” which began “Oski wow wow!” Vlasto was spooked by the chant, and believed the Americans had put a hex on her. Wills beat her 6-2, 6-2. After the last point, Little Miss Poker Face let loose with a smile.

“It was the best team I’ve ever been on in my life,” Wills told Engelmann. “We had so much fun and it was so pleasant.”

With Wills leading the way and garnering the headlines, the U.S. swept all five gold medals, three of them over French opponents in the finals. Wills also won the women’s doubles, with Wightman. Vincent Richards, a protege of Bill Tilden, beat French Musketeer Henri Cochet in five sets in the men’s singles final.

But the tide among the men was beginning to turn in France’s direction. Cochet was joined by fellow Musketeers Jacques Brugnon and Rene Lacoste at the ’24 Olympics. None of them won gold, but they would soon come together to challenge, and defeat, the Tilden-led U.S. Davis Cup team. To host that competition, the French constructed Roland Garros, which opened in 1928. Wills, known by then as Helen Wills Moody, won the first three French Championships held there.

As for tennis at the Olympic Games, 1924 was the end of the line for more than six decades. The IOC and ILTF (now the ITF), both of which were growing in influence at the time, and neither of which wanted to give the other any say in its operations, clashed on a number of subjects. Citing the terrible conditions at the ’24 Games, the ITF asked for a seat at the IOC’s decision-making table, but was denied. The IOC, for its part, wanted to define what constituted an amateur tennis player, which was a no-go for the ITF. But the biggest deal-breaker was the IOC’s demand that all other major tennis events, including Wimbledon and Davis Cup, be cancelled during Olympic years. The result was that tennis wouldn’t return to the Games until 1988, when another all-dominant teenager, Steffi Graf, won gold in women’s singles.

After the 1924 Games, Wills sailed back to the States, where she was met by a horde of grasping reporters and gawking fans at New York harbor. The American Girl graced front pages around the country. The New York Times marveled at her “perfect set of teeth” and declared her “as perfect a specimen of the outdoor girl…as this country can produce.”

Wills was held up by the U.S. media as a paragon of wholesome athleticism, and a better model for young women than the cocktail-sipping Flapper of the 1920s. In the minds of cultural commentators of the time, she represented a new type of American girl: Simple and dignified, but also free, assertive, and self-assured.

Until then, Lenglen, with her blazing red bandeau, balletic playing style, and mid-match flasks of brandy, had embodied tennis in the Roaring 20s. Now she had a rival, as a player and a personality, in Wills. It would be two more years before these two opposing forces would clash, in the final of Cannes in 1926, in what was billed as the Match of the Century.

The build-up, and the bubbling frivolity of the era, combined to turn the showdown into an international spectacle along the lines of Ali-Frazier at Madison Square Garden five decades later. That day in Cannes belonged to the Goddess—she won 6-3, 8-6—but the future belonged to the American Girl. From 1927 to 1933, Wills would win 180 straight matches, and finish with 19 major singles titles and 31 overall. She would also return for the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, not as a tennis player, but as a painter in the Arts Competition.

Still, nothing could replace the 1924 Games, and those first days in Paris, in Wills’ mind.

“I enjoyed it,” she said years later. “No, I loved it, I really loved it. I remember it all very clearly today, just as though it was yesterday.”