One hundred years ago, Paris held its second Olympic Games. Thanks to the film Chariots of Fire (1981), which dramatised the true story of two determined British sprinters, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, as they trained for the competition, Paris 1924 is one of the most famous of the pre-second world war Olympic Games.
The modern Olympic Games were created by French educator and historian, Pierre de Coubertin. The 1924 games were the swan song for the father of the modern Olympic Games and his final competition as president of the International Olympic Committee.
The early games were far from the slick events attended by teams from around the globe that we know today. The previous games in Antwerp (1920) were staged in a country still recovering from the ravages of the first world war.
