Paris and Chariots Of Fire Games made for each other

As Paris prepares to host the Olympics again, the Oscar-winning film recalls the last time the Games came to the city a century ago.

Not only is the movie a classic, but the title music, with its metronomic running beat, is iconic.

The success of the 1981 movie is also appropriate, because Paris was at a lofty peak in 1924 and the Games were a success.

British sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell won their gold medals, creating the legends that would inspire the film three generations later.

Widen the lens beyond the Stade de Colombes athletics venue where Abrahams and Liddell triumphed, and the host city had serious claims to being the centre of the world.

Paris and the roaring '20s - the height of the jazz age - were made for each other.

It was six years after the end of what everyone had hoped would be the war to end all wars. Germany wasn't invited to the Olympics. The post-revolution Soviet Union wasn't yet recognised as a sovereign nation.

Gertrude Stein, the American expatriate at the centre of art and literature in Paris, coined the expression "the Lost Generation" - those struggling to recover from the physical and emotional traumas of World War I.

Many found a way out of their darkness in the City of Light.

Pablo Picasso. Coco Chanel. Ernest Hemingway. Salvador Dali. F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. James Joyce. Josephine Baker and her banana dance. Surrealism. Man Ray. Igor Stravinsky. Stein. All were either based in Paris or flourished there in the mid-1920s.

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, one of his most famous books, is a memoir of his years in Paris through the '20s, on his way to become a literary star.

The American writer loved sports and was an avid boxer - but he was in Spain for some of the Olympics.

The Games were popular with Parisians, so no doubt there was crossover with the city's many resident artists and authors. There also was an art competition, a feature of each Olympic program from 1912 to '48.

Hollywood royalty Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford came to Paris to watch the Olympics.

The 1924 Games saved the Olympics, which had been struggling for popularity. The city and the event and the time meshed superbly.

Apart from inspiring Chariots Of Fire, Paris in the '20s also is a key setting for Woody Allen's love letter to the city, the 2011 movie Midnight In Paris.

Sylvia Beach, part of the wave of Americans who flocked to Paris in the '20s, founded the book shop Shakespeare And Company. It became a hub for English-speaking writers in the city and she published Joyce's novel Ulysses. The shop is still a book lover's mecca, albeit at a different Parisian address.

The 1924 Olympics also created legends. Australian swimmer Boy Charlton won the 1500m and has a Sydney Harbour pool named in his honour.

Finland's Paavo Nurmi cemented his status as distance running's first icon by winning five golds in Paris - including the 1500m and 5000m on the same afternoon.

Before Liddell and Abrahams were immortalised on film, there was American Johnny Weissmuller, an imposing physical specimen who won three swimming gold medals in Paris, as well as bronze in the water polo.

He would achieve much broader fame through the 1930s and into the '50s through his acting career, especially as the title character in the Tarzan film series.

Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, who won silver behind Weissmuller in the 100m freestyle, is revered as the father of modern surfing.

Uruguay stunned Europe-centric soccer by winning the gold medal - the first sign that South America would revolutionise the sport.

Paris and the Olympics a century ago were also a different time and place. Of the 3089 Games competitors, only 135 were women.

One was Trudy Ederle, the American swimming star, who had a below-par Olympics.

Two years later, she was the first woman to swim the English Channel.

Most of the Olympic events were held in July, coinciding with another major sporting event - the Tour de France.

The '24 Tour was also notable, particularly for what happened to defending champion Henri Pelissier and his brother Francis.

They quit the Tour after Henri had a heated argument with the race founder and organiser, Henri Desgrange.

The fuming Pelissiers told journalists about their hardships as Tour competitors and the drugs they took to cope.

It was an significant early reference to the sport's doping culture, including Francis' notorious quote: "we race on dynamite".

While these Olympics will be much different to 1924, many of the landmarks remain, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

But those roaring '20s are long gone. The 1929 Wall St crash heralded the Great Depression.

And 1924 - a year of so much hope - had a foreboding end a few hundred kilometres east of Paris. Five days before Christmas, Adolf Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison.

Australian Associated Press