Hosting the Olympic Games is a huge task for even the largest and most seasoned of cities, requiring years of careful logistical planning. However, hosting the Games also presents a cartographic challenge, with transport alterations and dozens of temporary venues rendering ordinary city maps inadequate for visitors. Special maps are often commissioned by upcoming hosts, allowing easy navigation by the influx of international travellers. Such event maps are ephemeral by definition, but many are preserved in our collections (you can read more about our collection of Olympic maps here).
As the XXXIII Olympiad draws to a close in Paris, we’ve taken a look back through our collection of maps made for the three Games held in the French capital to date; in 1900, 1924, and 2024.
The 1900 Olympics coincided with the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair which attracted some 48 million visitors to Paris over a seven-month period. The Parisian publishing house Garnier Frères published this map of the exhibition sites, which clustered around a central portion of the River Seine. It features an overview map alongside four enlarged insets which show the details of the exhibition displays.
Plan de l’exposition universelle de 1900 (1900), C21:50 Paris (8)
Detail showing the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, which were built especially for the event. C21:50 Paris (8)
Foreign publishers also took advantage of the event, with Edinburgh-based W. & A.K. Johnston Ltd. publishing this map for an Anglophone audience. The Johnston map incorporates three different scales on one sheet; the exhibition sites, central Paris, and the whole of France.
W. & A.K. Johnston’s plan of Paris, and Exhibition, and map of France (1900), C21:50 Paris (14)
Detail of the River Seine, showing the ‘foreign section’ and the artistic exhibitions. The river itself hosted the Olympic rowing, swimming, and water polo events in 1900. C21:50 Paris (14)
The first operational part of the Paris Metro opened part way through the 1900 Olympics, but its rapid expansion in the following decades meant that it played a more significant role in subsequent Games. This 1922 map by A. Taride uses a red overprint on a street plan to highlight the lines that would have been at the disposal of visitors to the 1924 Olympics, incorporating the competing Métropolitain and Nord-Sud networks, which did not merge into a unified system until 1930. The centrepiece of the 1924 Games was the Yves du Manoir Stadium in Colombes, which hosted nine sports, in addition to the Opening Ceremony. However, neither the Metro system or Taride’s map extend as far north west as Colombes.
Nouveau plan de Paris avec toutes les lignes du métropolitain et du nord-sud (1922), C21:50 Paris (47)
Detail of the area around the Champs-Élysées and Place de la Concorde, showing the convergence of Metro lines. C21:50 Paris (47)
One hundred years later, the 2024 Games opened in a very different, digital world. This time, organisers have launched a specially designed mobile app which provides dynamic navigation instructions using real-time data to flexibly disperse crowds and ease congestion. Alongside this high-tech solution, the organisers have also provided an outage-proof paper map, which joins our collection hot off the press. While 2024 marks the third time Paris has hosted the Olympic Games, it is the first time that the city has hosted the Paralympic Games, with the map designed to cater for both events.
The Yves du Manoir Stadium reprises its Olympic role as the venue of the hockey tournaments, but once again does not appear within the main map frame, which only includes central Paris. However, the Grand Palais, built for the 1900 exposition, does feature; this time as the Olympic and Paralympic venue for fencing and taekwondo — as well as a cameo in the Opening Ceremony, during which La Marseillaise was performed from its rooftop.
Paris 2024 : plan des transports publics (2024), C21:50 Paris (219)
Produced by Lyon-based firm Latitude-Cartagène (which specialises in event mapping), the Paris 2024 map draws on OpenStreetMap data and, like Taride’s map, focuses on public transport. The map tackles the unenviable design challenge of combining a street plan and extensive transit map with station closure information, 17 Olympic venues, and the locations of the city’s permanent tourist highlights. With an audience travelling from over 200 countries, the cartographer’s brief is made harder by having to avoid any culture-specific conventions or language. All the while, the map must be sympathetic to the Paris 2024 branding style — an important commercial aspect of a modern Games — as well as that of the regional public transport authority, Île-de-France Mobilités. Using a pastel base map, minimal text, pictorial symbols, and a broad colour palette for the thematic content, it clears these hurdles with gold medal-worthy clarity.
The majority of maps held in the collection are designed for the visitor, and show locations with text and information, promotional items which in the earliest examples were often part of a general map of a city – such as the 1936 map of Berlin, below – though of the 11 maps held on the Olympics in London in 2012 4 deal with the planning and design of the sites. The Lake Placid games were held in the Adirondack National Park, a mountainous range in North-eastern New York State, a popular winter sports destination which had already held a Winter Olympics in 1932. The map is produced by the U.S. Geological Survey, the national mapping agency for the United States and includes insets showing the lay-outs of the separate sporting areas around the village, including the Luge and Bobsleigh, the Down-Hill course and Village and Olympic centres.
