Never mind swimming or sprinting – the Olympics can teach us as much about history as sport

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s smash hit podcast The Rest is History explores what Paris 2024 can teach us about the French Revolution

As runners line up for the start of the Olympic marathon at the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville this weekend, how many will be aware that it was here in 1792 that the first Frenchman was executed by guillotine? The device was soon moved to the Place du Carrousel, where the Olympic balloon is currently aflame, and thence to the Place de la Concorde, where skateboarders and BMXers have been doing their daredevilry. 
When hosting the greatest show on Earth, cities take the chance to celebrate their past but naturally overlook the bloodier stains. Paris is no different. So a rambunctious multi-part podcast series from The Rest is History is here to fill us in on 1789 – the violent upheaval that gave us the tricoleur perma-wrapped round the shoulders of swimmer Léon Marchand. 
According to the podhosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, the French Revolution is one of the greatest convulsions in human history – so panoramic in scope that eight hours will get them only halfway into 1791. The humane contraption proposed by M Guillotin is yet to sever its first head, though to an uproar of guffaws he has already sidled in from the wings, alongside Rousseau and Voltaire, Robespierre and Talleyrand, Necker and Lafayette. 
They kick off, as joshingly as they mean to go on, with a charge sheet of Marie Antoinette’s alleged wickedness: libertinism, orgiastic behaviour, incest, bloodthirstiness. “Brilliant,” sniggers Holland. “Everything we associate with French history,” thunders Sandbrook. 
These two have reached a peak of listenability at which you’d happily hear them chortle through a history of paperclips or phonebooks. They operate as a pair of duettists in which one plays the main tune, the other a prompting counter-melody. So Holland, perhaps the more hifalutin swot, goes first on two fluffier episodes set in Versailles, then returns to lead on idealism. Sandbrook, with Bunterish enthusiasm, mingles among the people to witness riot and bloodshed take hold in French streets. 
It makes for a very downable cocktail of narrative and theory – they could have titled this miniseries “The Rest Is Historiography”. To help the sluggish listener along, many a contemporary parallel is invoked from Liz Truss to Feargal Sharkey. In episode four there’s a wonderful joke about tax. Although always honest about their own prejudices, they do love taking the mickey. “The égalité bros are quite sexist,” says Holland with an audible grin.   
The Rest is History’s runaway success condemns them to a road without end of lucrative weekly essay crises. The way they make themselves experts in areas outside their specialisms is a marvel and a mystery. Sources are of course scrupulously acknowledged, none more than Simon Schama – “We should make this the Schama fancast,” Sandbrook says. 
How many fans will read Citizens is moot. Podcasts have deposed books as a popular source of knowledge as inflexibly as the republic decapitated royalty. These two fraternité bros have brought about their own kind of revolution. 
Proof that pretty much anyone can hang their hat on an Olympic peg came with Composer of the Week (Radio 3). It explored Ethel Smyth’s passions, mainly for women, but also for tennis, horse riding, golf, cycling and shooting. “She was almost as sporty as she was musical,” proposed presenter Donald Macleod. It was fascinating to encounter the broad sweep of Smyth’s music, from opera to chamber pieces, symphonies with voice and rousing suffragette anthems. Almost as much fun was witnessing the effort to crowbar sport into the story. 
Take cricket. Smyth, who played for a ladies’ team, used her throwing skills to coach Emmeline Pankhurst to hurl stones at a minister’s windows. Later, when Pankhurst was doing yet another stint in Holloway, she told her friend to “rejoice in the sportingness of it all”. Macleod did his best to foreground Smyth’s sportingness, even claiming that she “could probably have been a pentathlete”. But the effort to link music to sport ran out of road with the suicide of her friend Virginia Woolf. “She was the centre of the one-horse life I have led,” said Smyth, whose own ashes were scattered on a golf course. 
Meanwhile, at Versailles, they were hosting the equestrianism. In the showjumping on 5 Live Olympics, Scott Brash on Hello Jefferson needed a clear round to secure a gold. Sonja McLaughlan at the microphone described every faultless leap until at the last she located her inner Noddy Holder and hollered in extremely upper case, “HE’S DONE IIIIIIIIT!!!!” Such a guttural roar has surely not been unleashed in the Olympic city since they severed Marie Antoinette’s neck next to the basketball 3×3 court.