Elvira Guerra

Elvira Guerra was one of two women entered among the equestrian participants at Paris in 1900. She competed in the hacks and hunter combined (chevaux de selle), aboard her horse, Libertin. Guerra was a niece of Alessandro Guerra, an Italian born in Roma, who was one of the greatest circus owners of the 19th Century. Alessandro opened circuses in Roma, Spain, Germany, and then moved to Moskva (Moscow), where he founded a circus named the “Cirque Olympique,” a prophetic name, in a wooden structure.

After contributing to the establishment of the famous Moscow Circus, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he opened another circus at the Kirov Orchestra (then named the Maryinsky Theatre). In his circus the costume designer was Cellia Guerra, although it is not clear if this was his wife or daughter. Elvira Guerra was born in 1855 in St. Petersburg.

At the time of the Paris Olympic Games she was already one of the established ballerina horse riders like the Medrano sisters and other famous female stars of the Italian circus. Elvira died at Marseille, France in 1937, and in her honor, a street in Bordeaux is named after her. The fact sheet about this street in the Bordeaux archives recalls her as “the famous Italian circus horse rider.”