by analysing the Exercise and Sport Competitions of the 1900 Universal Exhibition, this article proposes a reflection on how the sport event can be used to enhance the tourism of spaces, to showcase human progress, to disseminate the values associated with physical leisure and to ensure social cohesion. The study shows that exercise and sports competitions were organised with a focus on the universal dimension of events taking a variety of forms: festive, sporting and utility services; at the same time, the Olympic model was rejected at that time. The controversy between the positions of the organisers of the exhibition and the representatives of the Olympic movement highlights different visions of physical culture and its political or economic interest. Analysis of the corpus confirms that the 1900 international competitions, both in their diversity and their dispersal over time and in the area of the proposed festivities, respond to the project of valuing human progress, offering distractions to tourists and bringing people together, but only moderately subscribe to the narrower model of competition sport based on amateurism and limited Olympic ‘universalism’.