Paris 2024 – When Women became Olympians

By Louise Peloquin

The 2024 Olympic Organizing Committee has proudly declared that the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games are welcoming the same number of men and women athletes. Most Olympic fans have heard of French educator Pierre de Coubertin’s central role in reviving the Games in 1896, after nearly 1,500 years of abeyance. Parity requires remembering Alice Milliat’s then-impossible quest of including women in the revived Olympics.

Born in Nantes France in 1884 to a family of grocers, Alice quickly learned that the world is made to be explored and that a woman must pursue an education and learn a trade in order to be independent. At the age of 20, her eagerness to discover other cultures pushed her to move to London where she admired the English suffragette movement which was far more audacious than its French equivalent. While in London, she developed the language skills allowing her to become a translator and took up sports activities. Unlike French demoiselles, English women practiced a lot of sports. Alice soon became passionate about rowing. Upon her return to France in 1912, Alice joined the first woman’s rowing club and took the reins in 1915.

While men were in World War I trenches in Verdun, the Marne and the Chemin des Dames, she participated in creating women’s sports federations. Popularizing women’s sports was a real success. The number of licensed sports team athletes rose from 5, 000 in 1918 to 50, 000 in 1924. Emboldened by this success, Alice petitioned the Comité International Olympique (CIO) to open all of its events to women. Until then, women had only been admitted to rare disciplines like swimming for example. Pierre de Coubertin and his associates categorically refused Milliat’s request without providing any serious opposing argument other than obvious misogyny.

Rejected but determined, in 1922, the woman known as “the Napoléon of sports” organized, in Paris, the first Women’s Olympic Games. The CIO called this competition a “putch” or, to use the French term, a “coup.” When Alice set up the second Women’s Olympics, CIO member Sigfrid Edström exhorted her not to use the label “Olympic Games” and, in exchange, he maintained that he would open more events to women during the next Olympics. In addition, he offered her a spot as a member of the jury for the athletics events.

Drama occurred during the 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam. A woman runner lost consciousness in the 800-meter race, an irrefutable proof for Coubertin, Edström and the others to conclude that women were not made for such strenuous physical efforts. Consequently, the number of events open to women in the 1932 Games was once again, restricted.

Alice Milliat, carried on organizing Women’s Olympics and became the woman to bring down. Pierre de Coubertin’s wish had been to create Games for the nations’ elite to meet and to contend out of the battlefields. His Olympic dream was a celebration of  “civilized virility.” Edström and de Coubertin made sure to use their network of contacts to slash the grants destined to the individual they qualified as “a source of hassle.” Ostracized, Alice Milliat died in anonymity in 1957.

The Paris 2024 Organizing Committee contributed to repair the injustices suffered by this woman trailblazer by naming a new gymnasium in Paris after her.