Paris 1924

The Paris 2024 Olympics mark 100 years since the French capital last hosted the Games, and a lot has changed since then. From art competitions to the sprints that launched the Chariots of Fire legend, the 1924 Olympics were a Games of many firsts and lasts.

Some 3,089 athletes competed in 126 events across 17 sports but now, a century on, the Games have become supersized. Paris 2024 will see 329 medal events across 32 sports. Many have dropped off the Olympic programme and many others have been introduced; records have been repeatedly broken, and technology and facilities have developed beyond recognition.

The 1924 Games were the last organised under Pierre de Coubertin – president of the International Olympic Committee and the man who revived the Games at the end of the 19th Century. Sports federations had begun to take the Games seriously, standardising rules of competition, and Olympic organisations in many countries introduced a qualification process to ensure that the best athletes were sent to compete.

While the 2024 Olympics will look and feel a far cry from their forebear – as Paris welcomes 10,500 athletes to take part in its grand calendar of sports, none of them featuring a paintbrush – the 1924 edition helped to point the way towards the global spectacle we recognise as the Games today.

Records from 1924 show 19,052 spectators gathered at the Olympic Stadium, otherwise known as Stade de Colombes, to witness the Games opening ceremony.

The stadium in the northwestern Paris suburbs had been refurbished for the Games and was also the venue for the track and field, football and rugby competitions.

Fast forward 100 years and the 2024 opening ceremony is set to be an extravagant, entertaining and unique celebration.

A series of boats will sail down a 6km stretch of the Seine through Paris, with each Olympic squad on board their own boat, passing famous city landmarks as they arrive in style.

Going by figures from recent Olympics, the ceremony is likely to be watched by close to a billion television viewers around the world. What a difference a century makes.

Olympic Village

For the first time, athletes in 1924 could stay together at a purpose-built Olympic Village. Built near the Olympic Stadium, the accommodation comprised row after row of small wooden chalets complete with running water, and the site featured a post office, newsagent, bureau de change, hairdressing salon and a restaurant.

Media coverage

The 1924 Games were also the first to be broadcast live on radio. There were 724 journalists officially accredited to cover the Games, mostly coming from overseas, which was testament to increasing popularity and global interest in the Games.

Edmond Dehorter, sometimes referred to as ‘the unknown speaker’ and later as the ‘father of sports commentary’, commentated on the Games for Radio-Paris.

Olympic venues

The 1924 Olympic Stadium later also staged football’s 1938 World Cup final. Several renovations later, the same site will be used at this summer’s Games to host hockey.

Several other venues were built especially for the Games 100 years ago - such as a new aquatics stadium and tennis courts.

The Piscine des Tourelles – which will be used in 2024 as a training venue for swimmers - became the first 50m Olympic pool. Its lanes were marked out by cork floats.

Just two new venues have been built from scratch for 2024 as the City of Light looks to use its existing venues, along with famous landmarks as the backdrop to events. Temporary sporting stages are being erected, including one at the Eiffel Tower which will showcase beach volleyball.

Closing ceremony

The 1924 Games were the first to feature a closing ceremony with similarities to those of today. This involved the distribution of medals to competing nations along with the raising of four flags - those of the International Olympic Committee, France, Greece - who staged the inaugural modern Games in 1896 - and 1928 hosts the Netherlands.

Ireland

Ireland was also given formal recognition as an independent competing nation for Paris 1924, making a debut appearance in an Olympic Games.

Winter Olympics

Sports competitions held in Chamonix between 25 January and 5 February 1924 in association with the Paris Games were later designated as the inaugural Winter Olympics. Athletes from 16 nations competed in the Games across 16 disciplines, spanning curling, bobsleigh, figure and speed skating and skiing.

The 1924 Olympics provided inspiration for the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. The 1981 movie portrayed – with a little storytelling licence - the legend of British sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell and their pursuit of Olympic gold.

Abrahams triumphed first, taking gold in the 100m final in 10.6 seconds, getting the better of four strong American contenders in the six-man final, including 1920 gold medallist Charley Paddock.

Abrahams also helped Great Britain to silver in the 4x100m relay.

Following his two Olympic medals at the 1924 Games, Abrahams was forced to retire one year later when he broke a leg. He later turned to journalism and became an Olympics commentator for BBC radio.

Team-mate Liddell had counted himself out of the 100m on religious grounds, learning earlier in the year the heats were to be run on a Sunday, the Christian day of rest and worship.

Following the 200m – where Liddell took bronze and Abrahams finished sixth - many believed the man who missed the 100m might have rivalled his compatriot for gold in that shorter sprint if his devout beliefs had not counted him out.

There was still another opportunity for Liddell, however, and that came in the 400m.

Liddell, who dedicated much of the rest of his life to missionary work before dying in a Japanese-run internment camp in China in 1945, grasped his last opportunity in Paris despite being drawn in the outside lane for the 400m final.

Going out hard and holding on as rivals drew close, Liddell clocked a world record of 47.6 seconds to take gold, giving birth to one of the most famously fabled Olympic stories.

Chariots of Fire won four times at the Academy Awards, including the prized Best Picture and the Best Original Music Score for Vangelis’ stellar compositions.

Great Britain's Eric Liddell on his way to victory in the Olympic 400m final at the Stade de Colombes

Sprinters Abrahams and Liddell were certainly not the only two track athletes to stand out in Paris.

Two athletes from Finland lit up the Games in perhaps even more remarkable fashion, breaking records and dominating medals in the middle and long distance events.

Paavo Nurmi charged to gold and set Olympic records in the 1500m (3:53.6) and, less than two hours later, the 5,000m (14:31.2).

An astonishing performer, Nurmi added another three gold medals to his tally in the individual cross country, team cross country and the 3,000m team event.

In the cross country, temperatures were said to have reached 45 degrees Celsius amid a heatwave. This caused all but 15 of the 38 competitors to abandon the race, with eight finishers reputedly taken away on stretchers.

Nurmi was already a three-time Olympic champion when he arrived in Paris in 1924, having won gold in the 10,000m, individual cross country and team cross country in Antwerp in 1920.

The athlete who most closely challenged Nurmi’s greatness in Paris was his compatriot Ville Ritola, who won gold in the 10,000m by half a lap and broke his own world record by more than 12 seconds.

Ritola added gold medals in the 3,000m steeplechase, 3,000m team event and the team cross country, also taking silver in the individual cross country and 5,000m, finishing 0.2 seconds behind Nurmi in the latter.

Nurmi and Ritola’s dominance in the sport throughout the 1920s earned them the nickname The Flying Finns.

Ritola’s haul of six medals in Paris remains the most won by any individual in athletics at a single Olympic Games.

Of the 3,089 athletes competing in Paris in 1924, 135 were women. One hundred years later, 10,500 athletes will participate in the 2024 Games with an even split of men and women. It will be the first Games to reach full gender parity in terms of number of athletes.

Diving, swimming, fencing and tennis were the only sports to hold events for female athletes in 1924. Great Britain sent 267 competitors in total - 239 men and 28 women.

Two British women recorded particularly notable achievements:

• Kitty McKane - Only four British women have won five or more medals at the Olympics - Dame Katherine Grainger, Dame Laura Kenny, Charlotte Dujardin and tennis player Kathleen ‘Kitty’ McKane. McKane won three medals at Antwerp in 1920 plus two in Paris – silver in doubles and bronze in singles. The combined feats made her the most decorated British female Olympian until Grainger matched her haul 88 years later. She also won the Wimbledon women’s singles title in 1924 and 1926, and two mixed doubles titles at the All England Club, the second of which came in 1926 with her husband Leslie Godfree, just months after their wedding.
• Lucy Morton – Morton became the first British woman to win an individual Olympic swimming gold when she was victorious in the 200m breaststroke.

Competing for the United States, Johnny Weissmuller emerged as the undoubted star of the swimming pool in 1924.

He came with a complicated back story, having been born in the Kingdom of Hungary, in a settlement that is now part of Romania, before moving to the US with his family as a small child.

Requiring citizenship to compete as an American at the Paris Olympics, it has been said that Weissmuller hid his true birthplace and asserted he was born in Pennsylvania when it came to proving his identity. A 1984 Sports Illustrated story stated Weissmuller had doctored his brother’s papers to make them his own – as his brother had been born in Pennsylvania following the family’s emigration – and that he was duly waved through the system and into the US team.

Weissmuller’s son, Johnny Weissmuller Jr, later confirmed those claims to be true.

It was little wonder the US wanted him on their swimming team. In 1922, Weissmuller had become the first man to swim under one minute for the 100m freestyle and he repeated the achievement in Paris, finishing in 59 seconds flat to deny compatriot Duke Kahanamoku a third straight gold in the event.

Weissmuller went on to triumph in the 400m freestyle and 4x200m freestyle relay, as well as representing the USA’s water polo team, helping them to bronze.

He also won 52 United States national titles, set 67 world records and retired with an unbeaten amateur record having never lost a race, adding two more Olympic gold medals at Amsterdam in 1928.

Revered to this day as a swimming great, Weissmuller left behind his sporting career and entered the jungle of Hollywood, the golden boy becoming a star of the silver screen.

The United States dominated the medals at the 1924 Games – as they have done so frequently since - winning 99 in all, including 45 golds.

Following his retirement, Weissmuller swapped the swimming pool for the glamour of Tinseltown, being cast as Tarzan in the 1932 film ‘Tarzan the Ape Man’. He went on to play the character in 12 films.

The United States were unstoppable, with their 45 gold medals backed up by 27 silver and 27 bronze successes. Second on the medals table stood France, with the host athletes pleasing home crowds by totting up 14 gold, 15 silver and 12 bronze medals.

That nudged them just ahead of Finland, who had 14 golds among their 37 medals, with Nurmi and Ritola doing much of the heavy lifting.

Great Britain sat fourth with 35 medals, nine of them gold.

Gymnast group-Pearson, Kriz, Zink, Krus, Wandrer, Novak, Mais, Cremer.

For the 1924 Games, one side of the gold medal portrayed a victorious athlete taking the hand of a rival to help him up off the floor. The other side showed sports equipment as well as a harp to symbolise the cultural programme of the Olympics.

For this summer’s Games, medals will include metal taken from the Eiffel Tower. The hexagon-shaped tokens embedded in the middle of the medal are forged from iron removed from the monument during renovation work.

Did you know?

• Germany was banned from sending teams to the 1920 and 1924 Games, following World War One. The country was also barred from the 1948 Olympics after World War Two.
• Art competitions made up part of the Paris Olympic programme, with medals available in architecture, sculpture, literature, painting and music. Art competitions have not featured at an Olympics since 1948, having been discontinued amid concerns about the incongruity of rules that insisted on sporting competitors being amateur while professional artists were able to take part.
• Tennis was removed from the Olympic programme after 1924 because of a dispute between the IOC and the sport’s established leadership over amateurism, and it was not reintroduced until Seoul 1988.
• The number of participating national Olympic committees jumped from 29 in Antwerp 1920 to 44 at Paris 1924.
• The host nation’s standout athlete in 1924 was fencer Roger Ducret, who won five medals, three of them gold. Ducret is something of a legend: he finished his Olympics career with eight medals, and no French athlete in the history of the Games – to this date - has more to their name.

Credits

Editor: Melissa Coombs
Written by: Jess Anderson
Design by: Lee Martin
Illustration by: Selman Hoşgör
Sub-edited by: John Skilbeck
Images: Getty Images