France has had its most successful Winter Olympics yet, bringing home a record 23 medals from the 2026 Games in northern Italy. While French athletes have never topped the table overall, they have provided some of the most striking moments in the history of an event that was born in the French Alps more than 100 years ago.
Slow beginnings in Chamonix
France became the first country to host the Winter Olympics – then billed as an "international week of winter sport" – in January and February 1924.
A few months before Paris put on its groundbreaking Summer Games, the Alpine resort of Chamonix saw some 300 athletes from 16 countries compete in skiing, skating, bobsleigh, ice hockey and curling.
The hosts won three bronze medals and not a single silver or gold.
Among the athletes in third were figure skaters Andrée Joly and Pierre Brunet, whose ambitious pairs programme left the judges cold.
They went on to win France's first and only winter golds at the 1928 and 1932 Games (and, in 1929, to marry). Today, the pair are credited with pioneering skills that have since become standard in the sport.
France's winnings would remain modest at the next several Winter Games. At the 1956 Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo, the country failed to take a single medal – a low France has never hit before or since in any summer or winter edition.
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A new era in Grenoble
When the Winter Olympics returned to France in 1968, it marked a new era for the Games.
As host city, Grenoble opted to scatter events throughout the local region and devote the lion's share of its budget to building infrastructure instead of venues – a strategy Paris would later vaunt at the 2024 Olympics.
As sports authorities began to crack down on doping, the Grenoble Games were the first to introduce testing for banned substances, as well as gender controls designed to bar intersex athletes from women's events.
They were also the first Olympics to be broadcast in colour, and the first to feature a mascot, albeit unofficial. The character – a bobble-headed skier named Schuss in the colours of the French flag – beat competitors including Dof the skiing dolphin to represent the Games on merchandise.
France tripled the size of its team compared to the previous Winter Games and earned its biggest medal tally yet: nine medals, eight of them in skiing.
The star of the show was Jean-Claude Killy, who picked up three of France's four golds – including, controversially, in the slalom, which had to be adjudicated after his Austrian rival Karl Schranz claimed someone wandered onto the course and interrupted his run.
Granted a do-over, Schranz beat Killy's time – but was later disqualified for missing gates amid heavy fog. Judges denied his appeal, allowing Killy to make history.
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Protests in Albertville
France hosted again in 1992, another transitional year for the Olympics. The Winter Games in and around Albertville were the last to take place in the same year as the Summer Olympics; ever since, they've been separated by a two-year gap.
By then, the winter edition was beginning to come under scrutiny for its environmental and financial cost. As the Savoie department undertook major construction to build venues and the highways to link them, ecologists complained that the event was reshaping the mountains it was supposed to celebrate.
On the day of the opening ceremony, protesters paraded a green flame through Albertville to denounce what they called an "Olympics against nature".
In the end, Savoie residents would end up paying extra tax until 2012 to pay off the cost of new roads built for the 1992 Games.
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A defiant backflip
Making her Olympic debut in Albertville, French figure skater Surya Bonaly finished without a medal – but left her mark by becoming the first woman to attempt a quadruple jump at the Winter Games. She didn't quite complete her rotation and judges marked it down.
Six years later, at the 1998 Games in Nagano, Bonaly made another bold move. By then on her third Olympics, the former gymnast felt her athletic routines had for years been unfairly penalised by conservative judges in a sport in which she was one of very few black competitors.
She headed into her free skate injured and in sixth place. In too much pain to attempt the jumps she planned and realising a medal was probably out of reach, Bonaly spontaneously decided to perform a trick she knew was banned: a backflip, landed on a single skate.
The exploit delighted the audience but hurt her score. Bonaly finished 10th and never competed at the Olympics again – but her defiant backflip has become legend as a triumph of spectacle over competition.
More than 30 years on, fellow French skater Adam Siao Him Fa also dared to add the banned move to his routines. Officials finally lifted their veto in 2024, and Siao Him Fa was one of the skaters to perform it at this year's Olympics.
Skategate
In Salt Lake City in 2002, French figure skating officials found themselves in the spotlight.
When Canadian pair Jamie Salé and David Pelletier lost out to Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze of Russia, many questioned the scores. Suspicion centred on a French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne, who admitted – then denied – being pressured to give the Russians the gold in exchange for points for the French team competing in ice dancing.
Le Gougne and the head of the French ice sports federation were suspended, Salé and Pelletier were awarded joint golds alongside their rivals, and skating authorities overhauled the judging system to make scores less subjective.
There were echoes of "Skategate" this year when another French judge was accused of scoring French ice dancers Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron too highly, helping them to a gold medal. The governing body stood by the judge's marks, but is considering introducing artificial intelligence to further standardise scores.
From silver to gold
The past two decades have seen France gather notable strength in winter sports.
When French biathlete Martin Fourcade lost out on first place in the men's mass start at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, he said it helped spur him to go for gold in Sotchi four years later.
Except, as it turned out, he didn't lose out. The original winner, Russia's Evgeny Ustyugov, was later disqualified for doping and his medals redistributed. At a special ceremony at the 2026 Games, Fourcade saw his silver medal transformed to gold.
Added to two golds he won in Sochi in 2014 and three in Pyeongchang in 2018, the victory made Fourcade France's highest achieving Winter Olympian yet.
Sochi saw France secure its first Winter Olympics "podium sweep", as Jean-Frédéric Chapuis took gold in the men's ski cross, Arnaud Bovolenta won silver and Jonathan Midol landed bronze.
In Pyeongchang, French athletes racked up 15 medals, including five gold – a record that has already been broken at the 2026 Games.
At the last edition in Beijing in 2022, biathlete Quentin Fillon Maillet took on Fourcade's legacy and claimed two golds, three silvers – becoming the first French athlete to win five medals at a single Winter Games.
He has since taken three more golds and a bronze at Milano Cortina, making him France's most medalled Olympian of any games – winter or summer.
