What Happened at the First Winter Olympics?

The first Olympic Winter Games were held in the French Alpine resort of Chamonix in 1924. Initially called the “International Winter Sports Week,” the event attracted 258 athletes from 16 nations. Competitions included bobsled, cross-country skiing, curling, figure skating, speed skating and ice hockey but not downhill skiing. The Chamonix Games were officially designated the first Olympic Winter Games in 1926.

The first modern Olympic Games, promoted by the sports education enthusiast Baron Pierre de Coubertin, were held in Athens in 1896. They included events like track and field, wrestling, gymnastics, cycling and tennis. As more Olympic Games followed in Paris (1900) and St. Louis (1904), some members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) expressed interest in adding winter sports.

Figure skating—held at an indoor rink in October—made its debut at the 1908 London Olympics, and there were both skating and ice hockey events at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics.

Coubertin, however, was personally opposed to creating a separate Winter Games as part of the Olympics. He wanted the modern games to include as many countries as possible, but winter sports were mainly practiced in a limited number of Western nations at the time. Also, the Scandinavian countries already had their own version of the Winter Olympics called the Nordiska Spelen, or Nordic Games, first held in 1901.

When the Nordic Games ran into financial trouble, the Scandinavian countries struck a compromise with the IOC. Nations like Sweden, Norway and Finland would compete in the Winter Games but only if they weren’t called the Olympics. That’s why the inaugural 1924 Games in Chamonix were originally named the International Winter Sports Week.

More than 10,000 spectators and 200 journalists converged on Chamonix to take in the first Winter Games. The first of the 16 scheduled events was men’s 500-meter speed skating. American Charles Jewtraw of Lake Placid, New York, beat 31 other skaters to win the very first gold medal in Winter Olympic history.

In figure skating—or what the press called “fancy skating”—11-year-old Sonja Henie from Norway was the youngest competitor at the games. The diminutive, blonde-haired skater was a fan favorite but finished last. Henie returned and won gold at the next three Winter Olympics before becoming a Hollywood actor.

Ice hockey was by far the biggest draw at the Chamonix games. The United States and Canada met in the gold medal match after destroying the competition in pool play (the U.S. outscored its opponents 52-0, and Canada won by a margin of 104-2). The championship game—played with minimal pads and no helmets—resembled a street fight more than a hockey game, but Canada took the gold by a score of 6-1.

The Chamonix games were almost canceled because of bad weather. After rushing to build one of the world’s largest ice rinks, plus a state-of-the-art bobsleigh track and ski-jumping hill, Chamonix was hit with a historic snowstorm. Just weeks before the Games were slated to begin, more than five feet of snow fell on Chamonix in 24 hours. It took hundreds of volunteers to dig the village out.

Just as things were looking up, Chamonix was hit by a freak heat wave. The ice rink melted into a “swimming pool,” and an avalanche cut off the only rail line into town. Organizers seriously considered canceling the Games, but then the cold weather miraculously returned in time for the opening ceremony on January 25, 1924.

With thousands of spectators and glowing press coverage, the Chamonix Games proved there was an appetite for a separate Winter Olympics. At the 1925 Olympic Congress in Prague, the IOC voted to hold Winter Games every four years, preferably in the same host country as the Summer Games. A year later, the governing body declared the Chamonix Games to be the first official Winter Olympics. The 1994 Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer were the first to be held on an alternating schedule two years after the Summer Games.