Cricket in Olympics: Great Britain stumps France for gold at Paris 1900

Only 366 runs were scored across four innings but the low-scoring cricket Test match played in the 1900 Olympic Games has a special place in sporting history.

Played across two days between Great Britain and France, it remains as the first cricket match played in the Olympics.

It was a game that fielded 24 cricketers in all, instead of the typical 22, and neither side had players who represented their national sides.

This despite England playing Test matches against Australia since 1877.

Incidentally, the Paris Test in 1900 was the only international cricket match played that year.

But it does not hold the status of a first-class match as it was not an 11-a-side encounter and that it was scheduled for just two days.

How cricket at the Paris 1900 Olympics happened

While there were plans to include cricket in the Olympics at the inaugural Athens 1896 Games, it didn’t manage to gather adequate participation and so it was scrapped. However, the sport made its debut four years later.

In 1900, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium were slated to take the cricket field but the latter two pulled out after their bids to co-host the Games did not materialise.

In effect, it made the match at the Vélodrome de Vincennes, a cycling venue, played on August 19 and 20 between Great Britain, referred to as England in the flyers at the time, and France the final.

The match was originally billed as an event slated for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, a world's fair.

The European teams played what is in modern-day called a Test match, playing two innings each over two days - a Test nowadays is a five-day affair - though 12 players batted for each team after an agreement was struck between the two captains.

The printed scorecards, thus, had the additional name penned down by hand.

Low-scoring Olympics cricket match

Neither of the sides fielded a national cricket team. Great Britain was represented by the Devon and Somerset Wanderers club, who were on tour to France at the time and were asked to travel to Paris for the Olympics.

Their opposition were represented by a team called All Paris, whose 12 members largely comprised British emigrants.

Only two players from the 24 who took to the field over the two days had played first-class cricket.

Great Britain’s Alfred Bowerman and Montagu Toller, both having played for Somerset, incidentally put on the best performances of the match in batting and bowling, respectively.

Great Britain won the first cricket match at the Olympics -- but only with five minutes left in the second day -- by 158 runs as France could only muster up 104 runs in the entire affair.

Interestingly, the winning team were awarded silver medals while France were given bronze, with both teams also receiving miniature versions of the Eiffel Tower.

The medals were later converted to gold and silver, respectively, and the contest was stamped as an official Olympic event only in 1912.

Great Britain's captain Charles Beachcroft and Alfred Bowerman were the only two batsmen to score a fifty in the game, 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 put paid to the French side.

Cricket was pencilled into the calendar at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis as the USA played host to the Games for the first time. However, when the final event list was released, cricket was dropped due to lack of participation.

The sport has since made an appearance in three other multi-sport events. Cricket was played in the Commonwealth Games in 1998 in the 50-over format in in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Cricket also featured at the 2022 CWG in Birmingham as a women’s Twenty20 competition.

At the Asian Games, cricket has been held in the T20 format and featured both the men’s and women’s events in three editions. In Hangzhou, the matches were accorded international status.

Cricket will make a return to the Olympics at Los Angeles 28 after 128 years.