Decades before the Paralympic Games were born, the world's first multi-discipline competition for athletes with a disability took place in Paris in the summer of 1924. Reserved for deaf competitors, the International Silent Games were a landmark in sports history and laid the foundations for today's contests.
Among the many firsts for which the 1924 Paris Olympics are remembered, one is often overlooked.
Two weeks after the Summer Games ended, they were followed by another competition. Like the Olympics, it featured disciplines from athletics to swimming to shooting, and multiple countries took part.
But it wasn't the Paralympics. It was the International Silent Games, the first event of its kind and a defining moment for deaf sport.
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Founding father
Like the modern Olympics, reinvented by a Parisian aristocrat, the Silent Games were largely the brainchild of a Frenchman: Eugène Rubens Alcais.
Born the son of a postman in the south of France in 1884, Rubens Alcais began life with his hearing but lost it around the age of nine due to ear infections. After attending a school for deaf-mute children, he moved to Paris and worked as a mechanic.
While it's not clear where it came from, according to historian Didier Séguillon, author of a biography of Rubens Alcais, his passion for sport ended up defining his life.
"He was a very good cyclist. He actually started out as a footballer for Nîmes, then he came to Paris and took up cycling and middle-distance running," Séguillon says. "So he was a dedicated sportsman."
Séguillon is speaking beside a portrait of Rubens Alcais, displayed as part of an exhibition on the 1924 Silent Games at the National Institute for the Deaf (INJS) in Paris. Hung in what was once a swimming pool for deaf students, the photograph shows a wiry figure with a large moustache and an alert gaze fixed straight on the camera.
"He wasn't the type to shy away from a challenge, put it that way," says Séguillon, the exhibition's curator.
Having learned to speak aloud as a child, Rubens Alcais was bilingual in oral French and sign language as well as a talented writer, the historian explains. He used his skills to advocate for sorely lacking deaf rights, including access to education – a tiny minority of deaf children went to school at the time, and no teaching was signed – work and sport.
For Rubens Alcais, the latter would provide not just a pastime but the chance to prove that deaf people, far from being invalids, were capable of physical excellence. He became involved in setting up clubs for deaf athletes, and in 1914 founded his own magazine, the Silent Sportsman, dedicated to deaf sports.
A decade later came the opportunity he and his allies had been waiting for. The recently revived Olympic Games were coming to Paris, and the world would be watching as the capital wrote sporting history for the second time.
"It is France that rekindled the true Olympic spirit and now, 30 years later, the Games are once again to be held in Paris," Rubens Alcais wrote in a 1922 editorial. "It is France that opened the first school for deaf mutes [the INJS, in 1791] ...
"Thus, it is to France that the privilege of hosting the first Deaf Olympics should devolve."
Paris 1924, the Olympics that took the Games 'faster, higher, stronger'
To prove a point
The Olympic spirit that Pierre de Coubertin had rekindled three decades earlier didn't include many athletes who weren’t men, European, able to fund their own training, and non-disabled.
Like Alice Milliat, the pioneer organising alternative competitions for sportswomen around the same time, Rubens Alcais met resistance from the International Olympic Committee when it came to using their brand.
Renamed the Silent Games, his event nonetheless evoked the formalities of the Olympics, with a parade of nations, flag waving and an Olympic oath – this time recited in International Sign Language.
The organisers persuaded sports federations to loan them some of the same venues that had hosted the Olympics weeks earlier, and invited dignitaries from the worlds of politics and sport.
The contests also resembled the Olympics to the letter. "The idea was to show people that they were capable," says Séguillon.
"Deaf people wanted to do the same activities, exactly the same activities in the same conditions and with the same rules as hearing people, to show just how normal they were."
Level playing field?
Held over the week of 10-17 August 1924, the 30 or so events in seven disciplines – athletics, cycling, diving, football, shooting, swimming and tennis – thus took place without any adaptation for their 145 deaf participants.
Races were kicked off with a starting pistol, leaving competitors with the least hearing watching for the twitch of the official's thumb.
What wasn’t identical were the results. The javelin competition, for instance, saw throws some 30 to 40 metres shorter than the Olympic equivalent two weeks earlier.
Séguillon puts that down to the lack of training opportunities for deaf sportspeople, as well as the expense of travelling to Paris, which delegates had to cover themselves.
But he also believes that sports results aren't where the Games' true significance lies.
"Putting in good performances was important to an extent, but the main thing was to get together and hold discussions," he says.
The event brought together deaf delegations from nine different countries across Europe. In between competitions, they held the founding meeting of the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf (ICSD), which still exists today.
Meanwhile the closing banquet, attended by some 400 people, provided the opportunity to raise the issue of deaf rights with politicians and other influential figures. The Games were "truly a political tool", says Séguillon.
From community to contest
By the time they ended, they had generated mainstream press coverage and drawn crowds of up to 2,500 spectators.
The success "will earn our little silent world rightful renown throughout the world", Rubens Alcais declared in the Silent Sportsman.
He would go on to witness eight more summer editions of the Games before his death in 1963, as well as the creation of a winter equivalent.
The ICSD, which he chaired until 1953, continues to organise them every four years, though today they're known as the Deaflympics. While "recognised" by the Olympic body, they remain separate from it.
A century on, the movement that began with the 1924 Games finds itself at a turning point, according to Séguillon.
Today's athletes see themselves less as "deaf people who do sports" than "sportspeople who are deaf", he says. Understandably, they want the training opportunities, prestige and financial rewards that come with competing on the world's biggest sporting stage.
Many call for the Paralympics to add a category for deaf athletes. Others resist classing themselves as disabled and argue they should compete in the Olympics – as some deaf athletes already have, albeit with no guarantee of adjustments.
Séguillon points out the contrast with Ruben Alcais's original vision for the Silent Games, which he hoped would create "a single deaf nation, a deaf sporting nation", not set competitors or countries against each other trying to win the most medals.
He believes there is still value in a sports movement run by deaf people, for deaf people.
"Perhaps we could move away from performance and only performance, like we get at the Olympics or even the Paralympics. We could also value these games as encounters, as personal rather than national projects."
The exhibition "The wild week of the first International Silent Games" runs at the INJS in Paris until 4 October 2024.
