The 1920 Antwerp Olympics: The First Post-War Games

When the athletes of 29 nations marched into the Beerschot Stadium in Antwerp on August 14, 1920, they were doing something the world had almost given up on five years earlier. The 1916 Olympics, scheduled for Berlin, had been cancelled when World War I consumed the continent, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had spent the war years trying to keep the modern Olympic movement alive. The opening ceremony in Antwerp — modest, improvised, in a stadium hastily renovated by the Belgian army — was the moment the Olympic idea proved it could survive. The Games ran from April 20 to September 12, 1920, opening with ice hockey in the spring and closing with the Summer events in late summer.

Antwerp was chosen as host in 1919 to honor Belgian suffering. Belgium had endured four years of German occupation, the devastation of its infrastructure, and tens of thousands of dead. Hosting the Olympics was a symbolic gesture of solidarity. The 1920 Games are part of the larger story told in the 1920s Olympics cluster overview and the broader 1920s Sports pillar, which traces how the decade’s three Olympiads forged the modern Olympic movement.

A New World of Symbols

The Antwerp Games were a turning point in Olympic ritual. For the first time, athletes swore the Olympic oath — a pledge written by the founder of the modern Games Pierre de Coubertin to compete honestly and in the spirit of sportsmanship. The Belgian fencer Victor Boin was the first to take it. The Olympic flag, with its five interlocking rings on a white field, was also unveiled; it had been designed for the cancelled 1916 Games and finally flew over an Olympic stadium. Doves were released as a gesture of peace. The Olympic flame, however, was not yet a feature of the opening ceremony — that tradition would arrive at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics.

The athletic program was the largest in Olympic history to that point: 154 events in 22 sports, contested by 2,626 athletes (including 65 women) from 22 nations. New sports included ice hockey, figure skating, and rugby, while women’s swimming made its Olympic debut.

The Exclusion of the Central Powers

The most consequential political decision was the exclusion of the Central Powers. Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire — the nations blamed for starting the war — were not invited. Russia was absent too, both because of the ongoing Russian Civil War and because the new Bolshevik government had not joined the Olympic movement. The 1920 Games were, in effect, an Allied and neutral-nation celebration, a sporting continuation of the wartime alliance.

The exclusions opened the door to first appearances by several newly independent states. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Baltic states, Brazil, and Egypt sent teams to Antwerp for the first time. The fields were smaller than they would later become, but the Games established a roster of Olympic nations that would expand steadily through the decade.

The Stars of 1920

The United States team dominated the medal count, winning 41 gold, 27 silver, and 27 bronze for a total of 95 medals — easily the most of any nation. American athletes excelled in swimming, shooting, athletics, and wrestling, setting the tone for the interwar era of American Olympic supremacy.

Three stars of 1920 would loom large for years to come:

Paavo Nurmi of Finland, then 23, made his Olympic debut and immediately announced the “Flying Finn” era. He won the 10,000 meters and both the individual and team cross-country events, foreshadowing the five golds he would win in Paris. Nurmi’s metronomic style — a stopwatch in hand, an even stride he could maintain for hours — made him the most influential distance runner of the century. His reign continued at the 1924 Paris Olympics.
Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian swimmer, won the 100-meter freestyle at age 30, defending the gold he had first won in 1912. He added a silver in 1920, and his role in popularizing surfing outside Hawaii made him a global cultural figure.
Nedo Nadi of Italy won five golds and one silver in fencing, matched only by Nurmi and the American swimmer Ethelda Bleibtrey at Antwerp.

The American team also included the rower John B. Kelly Sr., who won two golds and would later become the father of actress and princess Grace Kelly.

The American Women in the Pool

The 1920 swimming events at Antwerp were the first women’s swimming competition in Olympic history. The U.S. team swept the women’s events, with Ethelda Bleibtrey winning three gold medals — in the 100-meter freestyle, the 300-meter freestyle, and the 4×100-meter freestyle relay — to tie Nadi as the most decorated athlete of the Games. Bleibtrey, who had overcome childhood polio, won each of her races by enormous margins. The 1920 women’s program was a tentative beginning — only two individual events plus the relay — but it laid the groundwork for the full integration of women’s swimming at the 1924 Paris Olympics and beyond.

The American men were equally dominant. Norman Ross of Illinois won both the 400-meter and 1,500-meter freestyle events. The U.S. team left Antwerp with five of the seven swimming golds, an early sign of American swimming’s near-monopoly on the sport for the next three decades.

”Blood in the Pool”: The U.S.–Canada Hockey Final

The most enduring single moment of the Antwerp Games was the ice hockey final played in April 1920 (the tournament ran April 23–30) — April, because hockey was part of the Summer Games program at the time. The United States and Canada had been rivals in amateur hockey for years, and the Olympic final in Antwerp crystallized the rivalry in one of the most violent games ever played.

The U.S. won 2-0 on the scoreboard, but the match is remembered for what happened around the goals. The two teams fought repeatedly, and the U.S. team came out for the third period wearing pajamas under their uniforms — a story the Americans told later as a gesture of contempt for the rough Canadian play, though it was probably a practical choice for the cold rink. Late in the third period, the game devolved into a brawl that had to be broken up by military police called in from the stands. The U.S. captain finally called his team to the bench to end the contest, and the Americans were declared the winners. The episode is known to this day as the “Blood in the Pool” game — though the venue was the Palais de Glace (“Ice Palace”) in Antwerp, not a pool at all. It set the tone for a century of U.S.–Canada hockey rivalry.

The Legacy of 1920

The Antwerp Games restored the Olympics as a working institution and provided a template for the postwar revival of international sport. The IOC, which had nearly collapsed during the war, was refounded as a functioning body, and the National Olympic Committees in dozens of countries began to operate as building blocks of the modern Games. The exclusion of the Central Powers was gradually reversed — Germany returned in 1928, and the 1924 Paris Games would mark the full reintegration of European athletics.

For the United States, the Antwerp Games were the start of an era. The 41 golds in 1920 and the 45 golds in 1924 established America as the emerging Olympic power of the twentieth century — a status it has never relinquished. For European nations, the Games were a chance to resume peacetime sport, and for Belgium, hosting the Olympics was a defiant act of national recovery. The story of how the 1919 host city selection translated into a working 1920 Games is part of the broader story of the Roaring Twenties’ return to normalcy. The 1924 Paris Games would build on Antwerp’s foundation, and the 1920 Antwerp Olympics would be remembered as the moment the modern Olympics came back to life.