Before thinking about Paris 2024's opening ceremonies being one week from today, let's flash back to Paris 1924, in many ways the first modern Olympic Games. The Paris Games of 1924 fit historically in the window of five enormously significant Olympic Games sandwiched between the first and second World Wars- Antwerp 1920, Paris 1924, Amsterdam 1928, Los Angeles 1932 and Berlin 1936. That the Olympics simply returned in Antwerp in 1920, after WWI caused the cancelation of the 1916 Games is probably significant enough. No Olympic truce for us 20th Century types. Amsterdam saw women on the track for the first time, Los Angeles marked a return to America and all that LA symbolizes in Olympic history, and Berlin is the culmination of the Olympics and political and social spectacle as Jesse Owens defied Hitler's ideals on supremacy as sport was a surrogate for statecraft.
It is in these "sandwiched Games," the Olympics first began addressing the issues that defined the next one hundred years, gender, race, inclusion, opportunity and global politics of society not just sport.
There is probably no better lens to see the modern Olympics coming of age than that of Paris 1924. Professional coaches, if not athletes. Yes, even tennis players like Rene Lacoste were amateurs, yes that Lacoste. It was the Olympics of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell made famous in "Chariots of Fire," of Johnny Weissmuller and Duke Kahanamoku who remain famous even today anywhere there is water, and of Jackson Scholz and the incomparable Paavo Nurmi. 1924 was also the year that Coca-Cola began the longest continuously running sports sponsorship in history with the Olympics that will celebrate its centennial in Paris this year. These Games would mark Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s, the father of the revived Olympics, last as President of the IOC.
The folks at The Atlantic have compiled an amazing photographic history of the 1924 Paris Games to help us get ready for the 2024 Paris Games.
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