Stade Pershing

Stade Pershing
Data
place	Paris
Coordinates	48 ° 49 '49 "  N , 2 ° 27' 23"  E Coordinates: 48 ° 49 '49 "  N , 2 ° 27' 23"  E
opening	June 1919
demolition	1960
capacity	29,000
Events
Interallied Games (Summer 1919) French Football Cup finals (1921-1924) International matches of the French national football team (1921-1926) Women's World Games (1922) Football matches at the 1924 Olympic Games Thirteen Rugby (from 1934)

The Stade Pershing was a football stadium with an athletics facility in the Bois de Vincennes in the French capital, Paris . Important competitions were held there in the 1920s.

An advertising poster for the Interalled Games

The Stade Pershing opened in June 1919. It was built by the US Army in collaboration with the YMCA . Its namesake, General John J. Pershing , commander of the US expeditionary force in 1917/18 , had it built as a "gift to the allied French people". The spectator tiers, which were laid out on piled earth walls, were designed in encircling, fortified steps on which the visitors could sit or stand. Access was made possible through several tunnels at ground level, from which one could get inside the ramparts. A covered grandstand did not exist, at least in the first few years. The stadium had a capacity of 29,000 seats, making it temporarily the largest stadium in France. The expansion of the Stade de Colombes to the Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir in neighboring Colombes (1924) and the Parisian Parc des Princes (1932) soon overtook him.

In the summer of 1919 the Jeux inter-alliés or inter-allied games , an international sports competition between the victorious states of the First World War, took place there. From 1921 to 1924, the finals of the French Football Cup were played in the Stade Pershing . The French national football team also played seven international matches there between 1921 and 1926. France's 2-1 victory over the “ motherland of football ” on May 5, 1921 -  Napoléon's 100th anniversary of his death - was crowded with 30,000 or 35,000 spectators; Thousands stood right on the edge of the field and sometimes on the grass. The French Football Association achieved the record income of 110,000 francs at the time . In its May 7th edition, L'Auto magazine , the predecessor of L'Équipe, said: “The Stade Pershing has already become too small! When will we get a stadium that can hold 50,000 spectators? "

The first women's world games were held there on August 20, 1922 ; Back then, eighteen athletics world records were set in a single day . The stadium was also the venue for four matches in the 1924 Olympic football tournament . On December 31, 1933, the first game of thirteen rugby on French soil took place there; the competing association then closed the stadium in January 1934 for fifteen rugby games. As the first major event in which social democrats and communists took part, an international workers' athletes' meeting took place in the Stade Pershing in August 1934, during which a tournament declared as a workers' world championship was held, which saw itself as a counter-event to the world championship in fascist Italy .

From 1960 the Stade Pershing was dismantled. Since then, there has been a sports facility that includes a soccer field with six running tracks, a basketball field, a volleyball field, two handball fields, two baseball fields and a softball field.

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  Aerial view

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  Last construction work shortly before the opening

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  Opening ceremony on June 22, 1919

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  Full south stand in 1919

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  The stadium area today

literature

• Pierre Delaunay / Jacques de Ryswick / Jean Cornu: 100 ans de football en France. Atlas, Paris 1982, 1983² ISBN 2-7312-0108-8
• L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: Coupe de France. La folle épopée. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2007 ISBN 978-2-915-53562-4

Web links

• Maréchal Pétain and General Pershing at the stadium inauguration ( memento of February 13, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Delaunay / de Ryswick / Cornu, p. 95 (also a photo of one of the two long grandstand sections)
2. ^ ^{A b} L'Équipe / Ejnès, Coupe, p. 311
3. ^ Alfred Wahl: Les archives du football. Sport et société en France (1880-1980). Gallimard, o.O. 1989 ISBN 2-0707-1603-1 , p. 183
4. ↑ L'Équipe / Ejnès, Coupe, pp. 337-340
5. ^ Jean-Philippe Rethacker / Jacques Thibert: La fabuleuse histoire du football. Minerva, Genève 1996, 2003² ISBN 978-2-8307-0661-1 , p. 66, from which the statement "35,000 viewers" comes.
6. ↑ L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: La belle histoire. L'équipe de France de football. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2004 ISBN 2-951-96053-0 , p. 30/31 (there also facsimile of the L'Auto article) and 295ff.
7. ↑ Laurence Prudhomme-Poncet: Histoire du football féminin au XXe siècle. L'Harmattan, Paris 2003 ISBN 2-7475-4730-2 , pp. 97-99; thereafter the event was called the “First Olympic Women's Games”, but it already had a predecessor of the same name (March 1921 in Monte Carlo ).