The 1924 Paris Olympics: Chamonix Winter Games and Paavo Nurmi

The 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris were the first Games to return to the city that had hosted the inaugural modern Olympiad in 1894–96. For Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the modern Olympic movement, the choice of Paris was a personal and symbolic victory: the city that had given the Olympics to the world would host the eighth edition of the Games it had inspired. The Summer Games ran from May 4 to July 27, 1924, but the year was even more significant for what happened six months earlier in the French Alps. In January and February 1924, the first Olympic Winter Games were held at Chamonix, an experiment that has since become one of the largest sporting events on earth. Together, the Paris and Chamonix Games established nearly every ritual and institution that defines the modern Olympics.

The story of these Games is part of the broader 1920s Olympics cluster overview and the larger 1920s Sports pillar, which traces how Antwerp, Paris, and Amsterdam together forged the modern Olympic movement.

The Chamonix Winter Games

The Winter Games at Chamonix were originally billed as the “International Winter Sports Week,” a one-off celebration of snow and ice sports. Only in 1926 did the IOC retroactively recognize the event as the first Olympic Winter Games. The retro-titling was a stroke of historical housekeeping: the Chamonix event had been organized on the model of the Nordic Games that had been held in Sweden since 1901, and only afterward did the IOC decide that a separate Winter Olympics was a permanent part of the Olympic calendar.

Chamonix hosted 258 athletes from 11 nations competing in 16 events across 6 sports: bobsled, figure skating, ice hockey, military patrol (a precursor to the modern biathlon), Nordic skiing (cross-country, ski jumping, and Nordic combined), and speed skating. The competitions took place between January 25 and February 5, 1924, drawing modest crowds and limited press attention compared to the Summer Games. The Norwegian team dominated the medal count, winning 4 gold, 7 silver, and 6 bronze. The Canadian Toronto Granites won the first Olympic ice hockey gold, beating the Swiss team 6-1 in the final. Charles Jewtraw of the United States won the 500-meter speed skating event, becoming the first Olympic champion of the Winter Games — though the moment was barely noticed at the time.

The Paris Summer Games

The Summer Games were the headline event of 1924. Some 3,000+ athletes from 44 nations competed in 126 events across 23 sports, an enormous expansion from the 1920 Antwerp program. The American team set a record that would stand for decades, winning 45 gold, 27 silver, and 27 bronze for a total of 99 medals — the most golds and the most total medals of any nation at any Olympics to that point. The U.S. team won 14 more golds than its closest competitor (Finland), establishing American Olympic dominance in a way that has rarely been matched.

The Paris Games introduced several lasting innovations:

The Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) was officially adopted, having been proposed by Dominican friar Henri Didon in 1891.
The first Olympic Village was built, a complex of wooden cabins near the Colombes Stadium where athletes lived together for the duration of the Games.
The standard 28-day format for the Summer Games was established.

Paavo Nurmi and the Five Golds

The single most dominant performance of the 1924 Games was turned in by Paavo Nurmi of Finland. In the space of a single week, Nurmi won five gold medals: the 1,500 meters, the 5,000 meters, the 3,000-meter team race, the cross-country individual, and the cross-country team. He was the first athlete in Olympic history to win five golds at a single Games, achieved under brutal conditions — the cross-country race was run in 90-degree heat, and Nurmi lost several pounds during it.

Nurmi’s training methods were as revolutionary as his racing. He used a stopwatch to time every phase of his training and races, and he developed a stride-rate counting system to measure his efficiency. He became one of the first athletes to use a scientific approach to diet and conditioning, refusing to race in the heat of the day and weighing his food portions with unusual precision. The “Flying Finn” running style — head up, arms relaxed, an almost metronomic stride — became the model for distance running for the rest of the century. The Finnish team won 14 golds in Paris, almost all of them in distance events, and Nurmi’s dominance would continue at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics.

The Stars of Paris

Beyond Nurmi, the Paris Games produced a galaxy of stars:

Johnny Weissmuller, a 20-year-old from Chicago (born June 2, 1904), made his Olympic debut in swimming and won three gold medals (100-meter freestyle, 400-meter freestyle, 4×200-meter freestyle relay) and one bronze. Weissmuller set Olympic and amateur records, and his career would carry him to 67 total records and, eventually, to Hollywood — he would star as Tarzan in a dozen films beginning in 1932.
DeHart Hubbard of Cincinnati became the first Black American to win an individual Olympic gold medal, taking the long jump with a leap of 24 feet, 5 inches.
Jackson Scholz won the 200 meters in 21.6 seconds, a record that stood for years. Scholz was a sprinter from the University of Missouri who later ran against Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Harold Abrahams of Great Britain won the 100 meters in 10.6 seconds, the first European to win the Olympic 100 meters in 24 years. His victory — and that of his teammate Eric Liddell in the 400 meters — inspired the 1981 film “Chariots of Fire.” Liddell, a devout Scottish Presbyterian, refused to run the 100-meter heats because they were held on a Sunday; he was entered in the 400 instead, and won it.
The American rugby team won gold in rugby’s last Olympic appearance until 2016.

The U.S. team, beyond its Olympic records, was a reflection of the Babe Ruth era of American sports — confident, dominant, and convinced of its own athletic supremacy. The 1924 Games were the peak of the first phase of American Olympic power.

The Legacy of 1924

By the close of 1924, the modern Olympic Games were firmly established. The rituals (oath, motto, village, opening ceremony), the schedule, the symbols, and the international scope all dated from Antwerp 1920, Paris 1924, and would be refined in Amsterdam 1928. The Winter Games, dismissed by some in 1924 as a minor annex, would grow into one of the two largest events on the Olympic calendar. The American team had set records that would not be challenged for decades. The Finnish distance runners had introduced a new, scientific approach to training that would change the sport forever.

The 1924 Games were also the last to be held in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Central Powers were still excluded from Paris — Germany did not return until 1928, and the Soviet Union would not participate until 1952 — but the European powers that remained were at peace. The story of how the post-war world rebuilt itself through international sport is told in fuller context at Key Events of 1927, which traces the high-water mark of the interwar decade. The Paris Games of 1924 were the foundation on which the rest of the 1920s Olympic movement would be built.