So, with the season of goodwill upon us, it seems a good time to pass on a small fact I stumbled upon while fossicking around in historical sports documents, in this case the weighty Official Report of the Paris 1900 Olympic Games.

These Games are famous for including pretty much everything, from balloon racing to angling and for featuring a grand total of 58,731 active participants, so I should perhaps have been less surprised than I was.

Nonetheless, I really was not expecting to discover in the midst of those nearly 800 pages that obstacle racing has an Olympic pedigree - what is more this pedigree, limited as it is, predates the entire sport that is now embracing it as a possible replacement for its equestrian leg.

The aquatics programme at these second Games of the modern era was limited in scope, consisting of nine male-only events - one for professional swimmers - and a couple of diving exhibitions, spread over four mid-August days.

Everything took place in the Seine, even - in spite of the current - the water-polo competition.

If you are familiar with the Georges Seurat masterpiece, Bathers at Asnières, that approximately is the stretch of the river that was used, although the painting dates from 16 years earlier.

Amazingly enough, one of the disciplines included was a 200-metre obstacle race.

According to the Report, these obstacles took the form of boats that competitors had to clamber over or dive underneath, "in line with the indications of the race commissioners."

Olympedia says that competitors were confronted with three obstacles in all - the first, a pole that had to be climbed over, the second a row of boats (also climbed over), and then a final row of boats that they swam underneath.

With 12 competitors entered, there was a qualification round producing 10 finalists.

The winner in 2min 38.4sec was an Australian called Fred Lane who had taken up swimming after being saved from drowning as a four-year-old.

Lane, who by this time had moved to the English seaside resort of Blackpool, was a top, top swimmer of his era who also won the 200m freestyle, indicating that the obstacle race was by no means viewed as a novelty event.

In the silver medal position, 1.6 seconds behind Lane, was an Austrian swimmer called Otto Wahle.

He later moved to New York and became a United States citizen, coaching the US swimming team at the Stockholm 1912 Games.

Third, a further 7.4 seconds back, was a British swimmer called Peter Kemp, also a top water-polo player.

The highest-placed French swimmer, Maurice Hochepied, could manage no better than seventh.

The Official Report concluded that in swimming the foreign contingent demonstrated "an incontestable superiority over our nationals."

It went on: "French competitors took fifth place on average, with the exception of the underwater swimming event in which members of the Lille Tritons…finished first and second.

"Foreigners do not much practice this form of the sport, which they believe, with good reason, to be very dangerous."

Even in this discipline, the home swimmers’ superiority should have been challenged by a Danish competitor called Peder Lykkeberg.

The Dane managed to spend a minute and a half under water, far longer than any other competitor.

Unfortunately, distance travelled in a straight line was taken into account as well as how long each swimmer managed to hold their breath, and Lykkeberg is said to have swum around in circles.

The Report concludes with an appeal to the main French cities to build - and then subsidise the use of - summer and winter swimming pools.

This was the only time in the history of the modern Olympics that an aquatic obstacle race featured.

I cannot help but feel this is a bit of a shame - it might have injected a whole new dimension into the classic rivalry over the 200-metre distance between Ian Thorpe, Pieter van den Hoogenband and Michael Phelps in the early years of the millennium.

I am no great advocate of taking horses out of the modern pentathlon; in fact I think it would be a great pity.

But if they are to be replaced by obstacle racing, perhaps the sport would consider incorporating this obstacle race into the existing swimming component.

It would be a novel legacy for these long-ago first French Olympic Games.