THE NOBLE SPORT OF PG

One of the weirdest events in the 1900 Paris Olympics--an Olympics which had many weird events--was poodle grooming, which took place in the pastoral location of  Bois de Boulogne.

The rules were fairly simple. The goal of each contestant was to clip the most poodles within a 2-hour period. Out of the 128 competitors who participated, a 37-year old farmer's wife from the Auvergne region triumphed by shearing 17 poodles within the allotted time.

The event was one of the most popular and was witnessed by 6,000 spectators. It was held over the objections of the founder of the modern Olympic movement--Baron Pierre de Coubertin--and was never repeated. 

The sands of time have obscured answers to many questions, such as who provided the poodles, were they all of the same size and temperament, how much hair had to be removed to constitute an acceptable clip, etc.

A routine internet search will yield many sites describing the poodle grooming competition of the 1900 Olympics.

But, wait a minute... none of these sites predate an article on the subject published by Christopher Lyles, a writer for The Daily Telegraph in London. Lyles was writing a series of stories about the Olympics in anticipation of the then upcoming 2008 games in Beijing. His poodle-clipping article appeared on April 1 of that year. In the story, he mentioned that the name of the first-place winner was "April  Lafoule" and that the competition took place in 1900 on April 1. 

Notwithstanding the obvious and correct conclusion that the story was an April Fool's Day prank, it started circulating on the internet (albeit sans reference to the blatant April 1 clues) and eventually found itself published as true in many news outlets. Finally, on August 15, 2008, The Daily Telegraph released a story specifically describing and admitting the hoax. 

So, that was that. Not really. Remember, I said that a routine internet search will yield many sites describing the poodle grooming competition of the 1900 Olympics. They have not apparently gotten the message that it was a joke. Most of these sites still maintain the fiction that there was such an event at the Paris Olympics. 

It is thus important to remember that anything on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt (including, of course, Henry's Daily Factoids). As Shakespeare wrote, "The evil that men do online lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

Belinda Hankins Miller, CC BY 2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons