The ‘First’ Winter Olympics
How Chamonix 1924 iced out a rival Nordic competition
The year was 1924. The place was Chamonix, a French Alpine town just below the snowy slopes of Mont Blanc. There, a global sporting tradition began—albeit modestly. At the time, the event was called La Semaine Internationale des Sports d’Hiver — International Winter Sports Week. The following year, the International Olympic Committee retroactively christened Chamonix 1924 as the first modern Winter Games.
Nearly a century later, the Winter Olympics’ outsize influence is readily apparent. For 16 days every four years, winter sports — many of which attract only niche audiences during the other three years and 349 days — capture the attention of the world. These include the glamorized sports of downhill skiing, figure skating, and ice hockey — alongside the decidedly less–romanticized events of bobsled, biathlon, and curling.
Of course, today’s wall–to–wall NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics would probably be unfathomable to the small audience of 10,000 spectators in Chamonix. It begs the question—just how did these ice–themed Olympics come to be?
As it turns out, part of the answer lies in the story of a fierce competition between rival international sports championships—the Olympics and the little–remembered Nordic Games. In this…
