The competitors, wearing only a pair of leather breeches, coat themselves in olive oil and perform a ceremonial procession before getting to grips with their slippery opponents and flinging each other around to the delighted cheers of thousands of spectators.
Olive oil is used by competitors to make themselves slippery.
Nowadays, popular cinemas have found an appropriate home on the boulevards, for it was at the Hetel Scribe, near the Opera, that the Lumiare brothers staged the first public moving picture show in 1895.