unknown French boy

An "unknown French boy" is recorded to have participated as the replacement coxswain for the gold-winning (Olympic medals were not awarded in all events at the 1900 Summer Olympics, but competitors from this period are retroactively categorized by medals corresponding to their placement.) The team was actually awarded a bronze statue titled La Chanson. After winning, the three posed for a photograph before the boy disappeared back into the crowd.

Identity Historian Hilary Evans described the identity of the boy as "the biggest Olympics mystery of all", In the IOC Historical Archives of the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne, he is never mentioned by name, instead being consistently listed as the "unknown French boy". The only known photograph of the boy was discovered by Bijkerk, who spent nearly fifty years trying to uncover his identity. In a 2014 article for the Dutch magazine De Sportwereld, Bijkerk speculated that the boy may have been a member of the Basse Seine Rowing Society in France. Evans speculated, on the basis of visual resemblance, that the boy may have been Belgian Olympian Alfred Van Landeghem, although he admitted that the evidence supporting this hypothesis was "circumstantial at best". Several historians from the International Society of Olympic Historians remained unconvinced that Nikoladze was really the unknown coxswain owing to the circumstantial evidence. Bill Mallon said that the unknown boy looked "a little" like Nikoladze.