The first edition of the Winter Olympic Games took place one hundred years ago in Chamonix (France). From January 25 to February 5, 1924, the competitions, called “international winter sports week,” brought together delegations from 17 countries (all European except Canada and the United States) and a total of 293 athletes, according to the report. official. All competitors were men except 13 women, registered in figure skating. A year later, the IOC made the Winter Games official, awarded Saint-Moritz (Switzerland) the 1928 edition and finally considered, a posteriori, that the Chamonix competitions, where there was no Spanish participation, should be considered the first Winter Games. Winter of history.
Chamonix, in the department of Haute-Savoie, had about three thousand inhabitants in 1924 (close to triple today) and hosted nine disciplines, but without alpine skiing, since it was considered a minor specialty compared to Nordic skiing. .
The Finnish speed skater Clas Thunberg became the dominator of the Games, with his five medals, three gold. But the sensation of Chamonix was the Norwegian Sonja Henie. Although she finished last in figure skating, eighth out of eight competitors, spectators and the press forgave her falls, appreciated her daring, her acrobatic gestures and the simplicity with which she tried to modulate her exercises to get closer to her coach and receive instructions. Henie was 11 years old. The figure of the Norwegian girl even stole the covers from the winner, the Austrian Herma Planck-Szabo, ten years her senior.
Henie’s sporting career was brilliant. She won Olympic gold in the next three Games, from 1928 to 1936, at which time she decided to turn professional and compete in all types of exhibitions, especially in the US, in addition to beginning a lucrative career as a Hollywood actress. .
Born in Cristiania (now Oslo) in 1912, she was the daughter of a former world cycling champion, who hired the best coaches and encouraged her sporting career. At the age of 10 she was already the Norwegian figure skating champion, a title she often defended. She was also world champion ten times in a row and her first Olympic gold, at 15 years and 10 months, was a youth record that was not broken until 70 years later, by the American Tara Lipinski, in 1998, in Nagano.
Hired by Darryl F. Zanuck for 20th Century Fox, she made her screen debut in 1936, in the film One in a Million, alongside Adolphe Menjou, playing… an ice skater. Although American critics did not appreciate her strong accent (she did not speak English and saved the dialogues with a phonetic transcription) nor did they consider her a high-level actress, the figure skating scenes dazzled the public and the productions were profitable to the point of becoming a of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. The press disclosed romances (true or not) with actors like Tyrone Power or with the boxer Joe Louis and thus magnified the myth.
However, his artistic figure declined when photographs of him shaking hands with Adolf Hitler were recovered, without considering that it was an image corresponding to his success at the 1936 Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Suffering from leukemia, Sonja Henie died on October 12, 1969 when she was being transferred from Paris to Oslo on a medical plane as her illness worsened.
The Chamonix Games were a popular success in open-air competitions, not so much in paid activities: for the opening ceremony, explains L’Équipe, 287 tickets were sold although another 1,782 people attended, including guests, organizers and journalists. From the closing banquet, it is remembered that the members of the ice hockey teams of Canada (gold) and the USA (silver) also stood out as consummate alcohol drinkers.
The Games left a considerable economic debt, which was covered between the French State and the French Olympic Committee.
