Since Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games from ancient Greece in 1896, they have been held almost continuously every four years (with exceptions in 1916, 1940, and 1944 due to world wars). In each edition, changes and additions to the list of admitted sports, whether competitive or exhibition, are often considered. A glimpse into the history of this event reveals that some of the sports included in the past were as astonishing as Olympic dueling, a recreation of pistol challenges typical of another era.

Months ago, we published an article here in which we explained that between 1912 and 1948, the Games included competitions in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. There were even discussions about expanding them to include dance, film, photography, and theater. However, only mountaineering and aeronautics were temporarily added.

The truth is that, while this list may be unusual for many readers, the surprise will be even greater knowing that in the 1906 and 1908 Olympics, there were several pistol shooting events where the target was not a bullseye but a human-shaped dummy in one case and, even more astonishingly, a real opponent in the other.

Pierre de Coubertain/Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

Honor duels were a way to settle differences for centuries, at least since the 15th century as we know them (earlier challenges had somewhat different characteristics). They were the affairs of gentlemen (Spanish future minister Indalecio Prieto declined one, humorously claiming not to be a gentleman), and therefore, they were probably allowed or at least overlooked even when authorities prohibited them.

There were also duels among ladies, though much less frequent. Therefore, they continued to be practiced legally or illegally, and in the 19th century, they experienced a resurgence, in part because the custom expanded beyond its aristocratic confines to other social strata.

Politicians and journalists, due to their profession, became the main participants in duels, and some press offices even had a room equipped for fencing (the mentioned case of Prieto was when he was an editor at El Liberal and had gone through the same in his early days at La Voz de Vizcaya). Sabres and swords resisted, albeit increasingly less so, as firearms tended to displace them.

Poster of the Athens Intercalated Games, 1906/Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

This situation persisted longer than one might think, as duels were not banned in Europe until 1905, in Spain ten years later, and the last recorded date in America was 1971 (in Uruguay; and remember that Chilean Salvador Allende dueled in 1952 with opponent Raúl Rettig).

Many of these situations were resolved privately, but others, especially those arising from a public challenge (such as those made by deputies in Parliament or through the media), attracted a good number of onlookers. Hence, after the prohibition – carried out at an international press congress held in Liège – there was a certain void that the Olympic Committee proposed to remedy the following year with the inclusion in the Intercalated Games of Athens.

The Intercalated Games were not exactly the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) created them in 1901 as a way to honor the Greek capital – the venue would always be there – and to celebrate, as the name indicates, between two official editions. It also had something to do with the fact that the 1900 Paris Olympics were quite unsuccessful, in part because they coincided with the Universal Exposition, and an audience not accustomed to sports mostly opted for the latter. However, between Pierre de Coubertin disliking the idea, the Greek political context not being the most conducive to the event, and the fact that staging every two years was impractical, both for organizers and athletes, there was ultimately only one Intercalated Games in 1906.

Olympic dueling pistols with their wax ammunition and hand guards/Image: Library of Congress

Paradoxically, they were very successful and established some moments that are now part of the spectacle, such as opening and closing ceremonies, the parade of participants, or the raising of the flag of the winning country in each event. They also hosted, as mentioned, the first Olympic dueling events because, by then, a French doctor named Villiers had drafted regulations for the National Federation of Ethics and Fencing Societies of France, turning honor duels into a bloodless sport. He considered that pistol confrontations were a modern vision of fencing, which had already been included in the Olympics held up to that point at the initiative of Coubertin, who was a fencer.

Villiers’ rules did not substantially change the development of traditional duels, except that lead bullets were replaced by wax balls. Contestants would shoot at the referee’s signal, standing at a distance of 18 to 23 meters, wearing the necessary protections, as the projectiles exited at 87 meters per second: a cup attached to the pistol for the hand, a mask for the face, a helmet on the head, and a kind of black coat for the body – up to below the knee – which allowed seeing the point of impact relative to a target previously marked at chest height, thus determining the score. The result was similar to modern paintball.

However, the IOC considered that this image could be too strong for the Olympics, and instead of shooting at each other, the shooters aimed at neutral targets or dummies. Two distinct events were established, differing in the shooting distance (one was 20 meters and the other 25) and the time available for each shot.

A duelist in the middle of competition/Image: Library of Congress

In the first event, the time was greater than in the second, where each shooter had to fire when ordered by the referee, and all participants shot simultaneously. In the 20-meter event, the main target had a diameter of 19 centimeters, with ten secondary targets of one centimeter each to accumulate points. The gold went to the Frenchman Léon Moreaux with 242 out of 300 possible points, silver to the Italian Cesare Liverziani with 233, and bronze to another Frenchman, Maurice Lecoq, with 231.

In the 25-meter event, using pistols with a caliber between 7.5 and 12 millimeters and a barrel of up to 30 centimeters, shooters fired at a humanoid plaster figure 1.57 meters tall, with the target on its chest measuring 7.5 x 10 centimeters. As in the previous case, up to 30 shots could be taken to score points, which were half, 150, in this case. To the delight of the audience, the Greek Konstantinos Skarlatos won with 133 points, and the podium was completed by the Swedes Johan Hübner von Holst and Gustaf Vilhelm Carlberg with 115 each. Progress had been made, considering that in Paris, there was a live bird shooting event that resulted in the death of three hundred pigeons.

However, the path of Olympic dueling did not end there. In 1908, London hosted the IV edition of the Olympics, and dueling was again a present discipline, but as a demonstration sport, i.e., those modalities that the IOC includes from time to time, partly to promote them and partly to pay homage to the organizing country when they are practiced there. In the London case, dueling was not typical, but bike-polo was, a variation of polo that used bicycles instead of horses and was also designated ad hoc.

An Olympic dueling competition/Image: Library of Congress

The novelty was that, on this occasion, Olympic dueling resembled reality more because competitors did not shoot at dummies but at each other. They used the aforementioned wax bullets and protections, but even so, rumor had it, half-seriously, half-jokingly, that it was done to make it more sensational for the public.

The competition took place at the White City Stadium in Shepherd’s Bush, a district of the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, where a Franco-British exhibition had been held that same year, which included Olympic dueling demonstrations. However, being a demonstration sport, the results did not count for the final medal table, just as the IOC does not consider the medals from the Intercalated Games today.

This did not prevent a good number of shooters from participating. Like in Athens, many were military personnel, but there were also diverse individuals, probably none comparable to the gold medalist, Walter Winans, an American hunter and adventurer who had been an Olympic swimming champion and who, in Stockholm 1912, at the age of 60, would return to the top of the podium in sculpture.

Walter Winans with his medal

Winans was slightly injured in one of the events, but his opponent – and friend – sports journalist Gustave Voulquin, fared worse. One of the wax bullets nearly tore off the thumb of his right hand. Fortunately for him, real ammunition was not used, as Winans would have preferred, who ultimately believed that “dueling is to the individual what war is to the nation”: in other words, a necessary evil.

These accidents could have increased with at least one other competitor who announced that he planned to forego a helmet and mask because he trusted in the chivalry of his rivals not to aim at those parts, considering that the target was on the chest. It is not known if he was allowed, although it seems unlikely because other variables, such as wind, a momentary error, or simply poor aim, intervened in the shots besides that code of honor.

However, the matter did not have a more extended life, just like Olympic dueling itself, which did not become part of the Olympics again, at least with those characteristics of personal confrontation. Various types of shooting events on artificial targets, both static and mobile (such as clay pigeon shooting), with rifles or handguns (initially revolver and pistol, although only the latter would remain in the long run), did endure.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on June 21, 2019. Puedes leer la versión en español en Cuando los Juegos Olímpicos incluían competiciones de duelo con pistola

Sources

Michael Noble, When pistol duels were fought at the Olympic Games | Nigel McCrery, The extinguished flame. Olympians killed in The Great War | Bill Mallon, The 1906 Olympic Games. Results for all competitors in all events with commentary | Rebecca Jenkins, The first London Olympics: 1908 | Wikipedia

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