GAMING ELLES

8 NOVEMBER 2023 - 22 SEPTEMBER 2024

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SPORT

From 8 November 2023 to 22 September 2024, the National Sports Museum presents its major exhibition related to the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, inviting visitors to discover Les Elles des Jeux, which allows us to measure the spectacular progress made in more than 130 years, from the virtual exclusion of women to the fight for parity.

THEY WERE NOT WELCOME

Women and the Olympic Games have long had contradictory, even hostile destinies. De facto excluded from the Olympic movement when it was reborn in the modern nineteenth century, sportswomen took decades to gradually acquire their rightful place in sport in general and in the Olympic movement in particular. A journey long marked by prejudices and prohibitions, but fortunately strewn with memorable firsts.

Covering more than 500 m², the exhibition Les Elles des Jeux tells the story of this evolution, both sporting and societal, without omitting anything that has been said and done, not only in the early days but also more recently. It is therefore logical to try to highlight as many women as possible who have played a role or simply symbolized this evolution.

From pioneering leaders, such as Alice Milliat, creator of the Women's World Games in 1922, to great French and foreign athletes such as Christine Caron, Marie-José Pérec, Laure Manaudou or more recently Clarisse Agbegnenou or Simone Biles, they have managed, through their voices or their performances, to give themselves the place they deserve in the great legend of world sport. Individual stories can be more than just a podium or a medal.

TOWARDS PARITYIN PARIS 2024

After the success of the Victoires exhibition, produced with the exceptional collaboration of the Louvre Museum, which launched the cultural programme around the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP), Les Elles des Jeux also benefits from the "Cultural Olympiad" label and continues to place the National Sports Museum at the heart of the Olympic event.

From Friday 26 July to Sunday 11 August, Paris and France will host the 30th Summer Olympic Games, then from Wednesday 28 August to Sunday 8 September, the 17th Summer Paralympic Games. This is the third time in history that France has hosted the Summer Olympic Games, after those in Paris in 1900 and 1924, but the first time it has hosted the Paralympics. It is also the first time that gender parity should be fully achieved at the Olympic Games.

THE EXHIBITION ITINERARY

In an immersive and interactive scenography, the exhibition Les Elles des Jeux retraces more than 130 years of our contemporary society through the stories of emblematic women with exemplary destinies. The tour is divided into 6 parts, divided both chronologically and thematically.

With "They Are Not Welcome", the exhibition begins its journey through time with the first Olympic Games of the modern era. As much of a renovator as he was, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, faithful to his environment and his heritage, paid little attention to their fate at the same time as he brought ancient celebrations up to date. Women were enrolled as absent season ticket holders at the first games of the modern era in 1896 in Athens and reduced, at best, to a few leisure activities (golf, archery, etc.) on the occasion of the second.

In "They Take Their Destiny into Their Own Hands", the exhibition pays tribute to the (all too rare) women who have tried to play a leading role in the world of sport for a century. Leaders, journalists, authors, photographers, filmmakers, starting, of course, with Alice Milliat, the first to have tried to allow women to participate in sports competitions, particularly the Olympic Games, by creating, in 1922, the Women's World Games, whose four editions, until 1934, prefigured the women's competitions that would finally be set up from the second half of the twentieth century.

The theme "Forever the firsts" projects the visitor into the Olympic space where sporting excellence materializes. For women, it's a competition that rhymes with combat. The one p