Vélodrome d'Hiver

Based on Wikipedia: Vélodrome d'Hiver

In the summer of 1942, the French police locked 13,152 Jewish men, women, and children inside a bicycle stadium in Paris. The glass roof had been painted dark blue to avoid attracting Allied bombers at night. The windows were screwed shut. Of ten toilets, five had been sealed because their windows offered an escape route. The other five quickly clogged. For five days, these people waited in the sweltering darkness with almost no food or water, before being transported to Drancy and then to Auschwitz. Only four hundred survived.

The building was called the Vélodrome d'Hiver—the Winter Velodrome—and for decades it had been one of the most beloved entertainment venues in Paris.

This is the story of how a palace of sport became a holding pen for genocide, and what it means that the same wooden boards bore witness to both.

A Hall of Machines Becomes a Temple of Speed

The Vel' d'Hiv', as Parisians called it, began life as something else entirely. After the 1900 World's Fair ended, the Salle des Machines—a cavernous industrial exhibition hall—stood empty and purposeless on the Left Bank, not far from the Eiffel Tower. In 1902, a man named Henri Desgrange walked through it with an architect named Gaston Lambert and saw possibility.

Desgrange edited a sports newspaper called L'Auto, and he was always looking for ways to sell more copies. The following year he would invent the Tour de France for exactly this purpose. But first, he wanted an indoor velodrome—a cycling track where Parisians could watch races during the cold months when outdoor competition was impossible.

Lambert said he could build it in twenty days. He did.

The track was 333 meters around—roughly a fifth of a mile—and eight meters wide. On December 20, 1903, twenty thousand spectators packed inside to watch. They paid seven francs for the best seats, a single franc to see practically nothing. The building had no heat. The seating was rough wooden benches.

The first event wasn't even a bicycle race. It was a 250-meter walking competition. When the cyclists finally did take to the track, disaster struck almost immediately. Motor-paced racing was the star attraction of the era—cyclists drafting behind small motorcycles at terrifying speeds—but the banking of the track was so steep, so unfamiliar, that rider after rider crashed. Only one man named Cissac managed to complete the sixteen-kilometer race.

In 1909, the city decided to tear down the Salle des Machines to improve sightlines to the Eiffel Tower. Desgrange simply moved. He found another building nearby, at the corner of boulevard de Grenelle and rue Nélaton, and Lambert got to work again.

This time he built something extraordinary.

The Cathedral of Cycling

The new Vélodrome d'Hiver had a track exactly 250 meters long on the racing line—a precise distance that made lap counting simple. Lambert built the banking at angles so extreme they looked like cliffs. He installed two tiers of seating that towered above the track. In the center, where most velodromes left empty grass, he laid a 2,700-square-meter roller-skating rink. He lit the entire space with 1,253 hanging lamps.

A culture emerged around the place, stratified by class and knowledge.

The wealthy and the racing cognoscenti bought trackside seats where they could feel the wind as riders screamed past. Everyone else crammed into the upper balcony, from which the track looked like a distant wooden bowl. A rivalry developed between these groups—sometimes playful, sometimes vicious. Those in the cheap seats began hurling things at the people below: sausages, bread rolls, eventually bottles. Management had to install a net to catch the larger projectiles.

The main attraction was six-day racing, a format that had originated in London in the nineteenth century but found its true expression in America. At Madison Square Garden, promoters had discovered that audiences grew bored watching a single exhausted rider circle the track for six days straight. So they invented a team format: two riders who would take turns, one racing while the other rested. The event became known as "the madison" in English, or "l'américaine" in French.

The first six-day race at the Vel' d'Hiv' began on January 13, 1913. The field included Tour de France champions Louis Trousselier and Octave Lapize. By 9 p.m. on opening night, all twenty thousand seats were sold. The millionaire Henri de Rothschild, from the famous banking family, attended and offered a prize of 600 francs. The dancer Mistinguett, one of the most famous entertainers in France, offered 100 francs of her own.

Getting in became a badge of honor. A Franco-American journalist named René de Latour remembered: "I have known the time when it was considered quite a feat to get into the Vel' d'Hiv' during a six-day race. There were mounted police all round the block, barriers were erected some way from the building, and if you did not have a ticket or a pass to show, you were not allowed anywhere near the place. You can guess that the disappointed fans often produced a near-riot."

Starting in 1926, the races featured a "Queen of the Six"—a celebrity chosen to start each race. Among those who held the title over the years were Édith Piaf, the legendary chanteuse whose voice defined French popular music for a generation, and Yvette Horner, an accordionist who would later become famous for playing from the roof of a car ahead of the Tour de France peloton.

An American Showman and His Lions

The man who transformed the Vel' d'Hiv' from a cycling track into a multi-purpose entertainment palace was an American named Jeff Dickson.

Dickson had arrived in France from Missouri in 1917 as what was called a "sammie"—a cameraman sent to film American soldiers fighting in World War I. The nickname came from Samuel Goldwyn, one of the founders of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, though the connection was loose at best. What mattered was that Dickson stayed after the war ended.

He started promoting boxing matches in the Wagram district of Paris. Eventually he met Henri Desgrange, and the two got along well enough that Desgrange invited him to organize boxing at the velodrome. The first tournament, in 1929, featured a bout between Milou Pladner and Frankie Genaro that brought in over 920,000 francs.

In 1931, Dickson joined the Vel' d'Hiv's management and immediately began renovating. He ripped out structural pillars that blocked spectators' views. He removed the roller-skating rink and installed an ice rink measuring sixty by thirty meters. He built a removable cover for the ice so the space could be used for other events. The building was officially rechristened the "Palais des Sports de Grenelle," though nobody called it that.

Under Dickson's management, the Vel' d'Hiv' became home to the Français Volants ice hockey team. It hosted skating shows by Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure skater who had won three Olympic gold medals before becoming a Hollywood star. Holiday on Ice played there for nearly a decade.

Professional wrestling returned to France at the Vel' d'Hiv' in 1933, rebranded from "Lutte" to "Catch"—short for catch-as-catch-can, the aggressive British style. The sport's relaunch was organized by the Fédération Française de Catch Professionnel, co-founded by Henri Deglane, a former world heavyweight champion, and Raoul Paoli, a French rugby player turned promoter.

But Dickson's most memorable venture was a catastrophe.

Reading the newspaper Paris-Midi one day, he learned that the Schneider circus in Naples was auctioning off one hundred lions. Dickson bought them all on the spot—the animals, their cages, their transport trailers—for 80,000 francs. He would stage a spectacular called "The Lion Hunt."

He constructed an elaborate stage set. He acquired two sick camels that another circus had abandoned in Maisons-Alfort, a suburb east of Paris. He hired fire-eaters. He paid twenty actors to dress as African explorers. The vision was grand.

The reality was not.

The lions arrived from Naples exhausted and listless. Dickson assured reporters they just needed a good meal, and began having dead animals delivered from local slaughterhouses. It didn't help. On opening night, all one hundred lions were released into the arena, and they showed no signs of excitement whatsoever—much less the ferocity the audience had been promised.

Dickson ordered his "explorers" to fire their rifles into the air to wake the animals up. The hall filled with acrid gunpowder smoke. The lions responded by strolling around and urinating on the scenery.

Stagehands, now convinced the animals were harmless, began beating them to provoke some kind of reaction. Children in the audience started crying. Parents shouted angry protests. The organizers gave up and moved to the next act.

This went no better. The camels refused to walk in a line like a desert caravan. Their attendants—unemployed Black men whom Dickson had recruited off the streets of Paris—stumbled through the sand in their unfamiliar stage costumes. The show's entire run was cancelled.

Dickson now owned two camels and one hundred lions he couldn't feed. An assistant tied the camels behind a car, drove them to the Seine, and abandoned them on the riverbank. The police found them there. The Société Protectrice des Animaux—France's equivalent of the ASPCA—began pursuing Dickson for animal cruelty.

Eventually he rented out the entire menagerie to another circus for 10,000 francs a week. That circus promptly failed, and Dickson was summoned to collect his animals. In the end, everything was shipped to a zoo near Hamburg.

The venture lost 700,000 francs—nearly ten times what Dickson had paid for the lions in the first place.

A Darker Turn

The Vel' d'Hiv' was available for hire to anyone who could pay. Among those who booked it was Jacques Doriot.

Doriot led the Parti Populaire Français, or PPF—France's largest fascist party. A former Communist who had broken with the party and veered hard to the extreme right, Doriot modeled himself on Hitler and Mussolini. He used the Vel' d'Hiv', among other venues, to hold massive rallies where he roused crowds with his Hitler-style salute and recruited members to his cause.

In June 1940, Germany invaded France and occupied its northern half, including Paris. The Vichy regime, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, governed the unoccupied south and collaborated extensively with the Germans.

On June 7, 1942, German authorities completed plans for Opération Vent printanier—"Operation Spring Breeze"—a mass arrest of Jews living in Paris. The operation would use 9,000 French policemen to round up 28,000 people. Among those assisting would be 3,400 young members of Doriot's PPF.

The arrests began in the early morning hours of July 16 and were largely complete by the following day. The Germans needed somewhere to hold their captives. They demanded the keys to the Vélodrome d'Hiver from its owner, Jacques Goddet, who had inherited control from his father Victor and from Henri Desgrange.

The circumstances under which Goddet surrendered those keys remain murky. In his autobiography, he devoted only a few lines to the episode. He would go on to direct the Tour de France for decades after the war, his reputation largely intact. The question of what he could have done differently, and whether it would have mattered, has never been satisfactorily answered.

Five Days in Hell

The glass roof of the Vel' d'Hiv' had been painted dark blue early in the war, a blackout measure to avoid guiding Allied bombers to their targets at night. Now, in the heat of July, that dark glass turned the building into an oven. The windows had been screwed shut for security.

Of the ten toilets in the building, five were sealed immediately because their windows offered a potential escape route. The other five soon became blocked and overflowed. There was almost no food and barely any water.

Into this space the French police herded 13,152 people—8,160 of them from the city of Paris, the rest from the surrounding suburbs. About a third were children.

They remained there for five days.

The only aid came from Quakers, from the Red Cross, and from a handful of doctors and nurses who were permitted to enter. It was not enough. People collapsed from heat exhaustion. The stench became unbearable. Some lost their minds. A few managed to commit suicide.

After five days, the captives were transported to an internment camp at Drancy, in half-constructed tower blocks on the northeastern outskirts of Paris. From there, they were sent to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.

Of the 13,152 people held at the Vel' d'Hiv', only 400 survived the war.

The event became known as the Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv'—the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup. It was not the only mass arrest of Jews in France during the occupation, but it was the largest, and the most notorious.

A Young Englishman's Visit

The war ended. The velodrome reopened.

A few years later, a young English cycling enthusiast named John Aulton visited Paris on a school tour. The other children slept in tents in the grounds of a lycée and did normal tourist things. Aulton wanted only to see the Vélodrome d'Hiver.

He rode his Raleigh Sports bicycle across the city, full of anticipation. When he arrived, all the doors were locked and barred. There was no sign of life.

Without warning, a side door flew open. A small, powerfully built man came hurtling out of the darkness into the sunlight. Where his right arm should have been, an empty sleeve flapped. He poured out an angry tirade in French.

Aulton kicked the door and shouted in English that he just wanted to see the famous track. The door slowly opened again. This time the one-armed man was smiling broadly.

"Anglais?" he said, as if uttering a password.

In halting English, the man asked if Aulton knew Wembley. He had ridden in the London six-day there, he explained. He put his good arm around Aulton's shoulder and escorted him and his bicycle into the stadium.

What Aulton saw was decay. Dust covered everything. The track was worn and neglected. Shafts of sunlight penetrated the dirty blue skylights, illuminating particles dancing in the air. He walked to the banking and touched the wooden boards that had seen so much drama.

Then something happened that he couldn't explain.

Suddenly and without explanation a feeling of fear and revulsion came over me; I grabbed my bike and ran as fast as I could into the outside world. The door would not open at first but a panic-stricken tug freed it and I dashed out into the heat of a Parisian afternoon and pedalled away not caring in which direction just so long as I could get away from the Vélodrome d'Hiver.

The Last Race

The final six-day race at the Vel' d'Hiv' began on November 7, 1958.

The field included some of the greatest cyclists of the era: Roger Rivière, who would set the world hour record the following year; Jacques Anquetil, who would win the Tour de France five times; Fausto Coppi, the Italian champion whose rivalry with Gino Bartali had defined the previous decade; and André Darrigade, the French sprinter known as "the Greyhound."

The race was run with teams of three. In the first hours, Rivière crashed into Anquetil and had to withdraw. On November 12, Darrigade won the largest prime—or intermediate prize—ever offered at the track: one million francs. Anquetil's team, which included Darrigade and an Italian named Terruzzi, won overall.

By then the building had grown old and tired. It leaked when it rained. Electrical cables hung in loops from the ceiling. The wooden track was warped and dusty.

The final night at the Vel' d'Hiv' was May 12, 1959. The closing ceremony featured, improbably, the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. Among his stage props was a model of the Eiffel Tower, which he exploded to symbolize the end of the exhibition hall in which he stood—a reference back to the original Salle des Machines and the World's Fair that had birthed this strange, haunted place.

Later that year, a fire destroyed part of the building. The rest was demolished. Today, a block of apartments and a building belonging to the Ministry of the Interior stand on the site.

Accounting for the Past

For decades, the French government refused to apologize for what had happened at the Vel' d'Hiv'.

The official position, established by Charles de Gaulle after the war and maintained for fifty years, was essentially this: the French Republic had been dismantled when Pétain established his collaborationist French State in 1940. The Republic had been re-established after liberation. Therefore, the postwar Republic could not apologize for actions taken by a state it did not recognize and had not constituted.

This was legally coherent and morally empty. It was French policemen who had made the arrests. French bureaucrats who had compiled the lists. French train conductors who had driven the deportation trains. The fiction that all of this had been done by some other country, some phantom "French State" that had no continuity with the nation that came before and after, satisfied no one who thought about it honestly.

François Mitterrand, president from 1981 to 1995, maintained this position throughout his tenure—despite revelations about his own complicated wartime history, which included both Resistance activity and earlier ties to Vichy. As recently as 2017, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front Party, repeated the argument during her presidential campaign.

But on July 16, 1995—the fifty-third anniversary of the roundup—President Jacques Chirac finally broke with the official position. Standing near the site of the demolished velodrome, he declared that it was time for France to face its past.

"France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and of the rights of man, a land of welcome and asylum," Chirac said, "on that day committed the irreparable."

The acknowledgment changed nothing about what had happened. It brought no one back. But it mattered nonetheless—the difference between a nation that lies to itself and one that, however belatedly, tells the truth.

What the Boards Remember

Jeff Dickson, the American showman, returned to the United States in 1939. He joined the military and died on July 14, 1943—Bastille Day, France's national holiday—when his bomber was shot down over St-André-de-l'Eure in Normandy. He is buried at the American cemetery at Omaha Beach, beneath the third cross in the front row.

Ernest Hemingway, who had spent many evenings watching races at the Vel' d'Hiv' during his years as a young writer in Paris, remembered the place fondly in his memoirs. For him it was the smell of sweat and embrocation, the thunder of the pacing motorcycles, the way the riders leaned into the banking like sailors on a listing ship.

The Vel' d'Hiv' hosted the boxing, fencing, weightlifting, and wrestling events for the 1924 Summer Olympics—the same Olympics that inspired the movie Chariots of Fire, though that film focused on the track and field events held elsewhere. It hosted the European basketball championship in 1951.

Sonja Henie skated there. Édith Piaf sang there. One hundred listless lions urinated on the scenery there.

And in the summer of 1942, 13,152 people discovered what it meant to be abandoned by their own country in a building whose purpose was joy.

The wooden boards are gone now, demolished along with everything else. But history doesn't need physical evidence to persist. It lives in documents and testimonies, in the stories passed down through generations, in the official speeches that finally admit what everyone already knew. The Vel' d'Hiv' was torn down, but what happened there remains.

A stadium is just a building. It becomes whatever we make of it.