What happened in the poodle clipping event in the 1900 Paris Olympics?
The curious case of Olympic poodle-clipping is a classic web tale. Cut from the original Telegraph countdown and pasted into the blogosphere, it took on a life of its own, losing all its original context and eventually becoming a “fact” in Beijing. Here’s the April Fool in full: 128 days to go . . . The number of competitors who participated in the poodle-clipping event at the 1900 Olympics in Paris. The event was held in the leafy environs of the Bois de Boulogne and it was the only occasion that it featured as an Olympic discipline. This, no doubt, came as a relief to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French founding father of the modern Olympic movement, who had opposed its inclusion, but was outvoted by his International Olympic Committee colleagues. The gold medal was won by Avril Lafoule, a 37-year-old farmer’s wife from the Auvergne region of France, who successfully clipped 17 poodles in the allotted two-hour time frame. The poodle-clipping competition, held on April 1, was watche
