By the way...

Paris sans pétanque

Many Austrians also indulge in the game with the silver balls.

(Bild: Jomo KG)

New sports are constantly being added to the Olympic Games. The boules variant pétanque has not yet made it into the illustrious circle. Krone columnist Harald Petermichl took a closer look at why.

When Emperor Theodosius I banned the Olympic Games in the 4th century on the grounds that they were a "pagan cult", he probably didn't expect that the then modest sports festival would celebrate a happy birthday at the end of the 19th century on the initiative of a French educator named Pierre de Coubertin and develop numerous traditions that have been adopted to this day. The Olympic rings, for example, the Olympic anthem composed by Spyros Samaras, the torch relay, doping scandals and the questionable awarding of the Games by the IOC. However, another fine tradition disappeared in 1996, namely the holding of demonstration competitions to make new sports palatable to the IOC for inclusion in the Olympic program.

This worked very well for some; basketball or badminton, for example, went from a demonstration competition (trial round) to an Olympic discipline, while others were less successful. Gliding, Australian football, kaatsen or ballooning are no more to be found on the list of Olympic events today than curling or bowling, although all these physical exercises were once promising Olympic demonstration sports. But why pétanque, the ubiquitous version of boules in French towns and villages, has never been an Olympic sport, even though the Seine metropolis has hosted the Summer Games twice in the past, is probably only known to those responsible at the IOC.

IOC President Thomas Bach has so far shown no interest in pétanque.

(Bild: AFP)

They more or less ignored an initiative launched in 2018 by Claude Raluy, head of the International Training Centre for Boules, to include pétanque in the official Olympic program for Paris 2024, even though there have been world championships since 1959, in which by no means only French women or French men win, and even though the precise game with the metal balls is probably as suitable for television as curling, which cannot easily be said of small-ball shooting at 10 meters. It is unclear whether this is due to a ban dating back to 1629, which still has an effect today and states that boules leads to "vicious debauchery", or to massive safety concerns because an inferior ball exploded in Nettetal in the Lower Rhine region in 2016, whereupon special forces blew up the remaining game equipment in a controlled manner. C'est dommage, because it would certainly have enriched the Paris Games.