Pierre de Coubertin never wanted a Winter Olympics. He spent the best part of two decades lobbying, politicking and organising before he finally got the first summer Games up and running in Athens in 1896. Its winter sibling though, well, “the great inferiority of these snow sports …” De Coubertin once wrote, “is that they are completely useless, with no useful application whatsoever.” He allowed ice skating and ice hockey, the two stadium sports, to be part of the roster for the early summer Games, but it was another two decades before he was persuaded to hold a separate winter event.
That was in 1924, in Chamonix. The 100th anniversary fell midway between the last winter Games in Beijing and this one in Milano Cortina. It’s an interesting event to look back on. It was described at the time as a 10-day “winter sports week”, an “appendage” De Coubertin called it, to that year’s summer Games in Paris. There were 16 countries competing in five sports, with four more, including “military patrol”, added as demonstration events. It was only later, after the International Olympic Committee had become more interested in burnishing its own history, that this knockabout event was officially designated as the very first Winter Olympic Games.
