In the Games of the First Modern Olympiad, Athens 1896, 285 men participated and no women. In these (XXXIII Modern Olympiad), we have 5,250 men and 5,250 women, two perfectly matched halves. The history of the Games has also been the history of the advancement of women in this century.
Coubertin did not like them, but let us not judge him with today’s eyes. He wrote some things about them that, read now, are almost shocking: “For them, grace, home and children. Let us reserve competition for men. The Games are the solemn and periodic exaltation of sport for men, with the applause of women as a reward.” I will insist that we should not judge him with the mentality of this time. The world was different then. Women did not vote, to touch on an even more serious issue.
Of course, there were already suffragette movements at the time, women who demanded the vote by chaining themselves to the fences of parks. Some also demanded to be accepted into the world of sport, and among them Alice Milliat stood out, treated in my opinion very briefly in the long ceremony with water on the bottom and water on the top that opened these Games.
She was born Alice Joséphine Marie Million in Nantes in 1884, when Coubertin was barely twenty years old. She took the surname Milliat from her husband, who was widowed and childless at the age of four. She was a headache for Coubertin because of her insistence that the Games be opened to women, something that the creator considered aberrant. Very reluctantly, she accepted archery, tennis and golf, which women practiced dressed from the neck to the shoes. In Stockholm 1912, and at the request of the organizing city, she had no choice but to compromise on swimming, which at that time women practiced in bathing suits almost as modest as nuns’ habits. But athletics, which had to be practiced in underwear, horrified her.
Alice Milliat was a cultured woman, a translator by profession and an active suffragist. She practised rowing, swimming, hockey and even football, for which she organised a famous match in 1920 between a French team and the then famous Dick, Kerr’s Ladies, created by employees of an English munitions factory.
She founded a French Women’s Federation in 1917 and then encouraged the emergence of the International Women’s Sports Federation, the basis for creating a Women’s World Games, the opposite of Coubertin’s, which were so restricted.
Four editions were held in even-numbered years between the Olympics: Paris 1922, Gothenburg 1926, Prague 1930 and London 1934, with growing interest from a promising start in the first, which brought together six nations and 20,000 spectators. The progressive opening of the Games to women made them unnecessary. In fact, their greatest success came in Amsterdam 1928, when Baillet-Latour, Coubertin’s successor as IOC president, decided to open the Games to women’s athletics, to the horror of his predecessor and mentor. There were only a few events: 100m dash, 4x100m, high jump, shot put and 800m. And this was abolished (until Rome 1960) because it became a mountain when some of the participants arrived in a state of exhaustion.
Today women even run the marathon and there is no sport that is forbidden to them. The only difference is that instead of the decathlon they do the heptathlon. But it has been a slow journey, especially at the beginning. In the sixties, halfway through the Olympic journey, they did not reach 20%. Many countries did not have any. In Mexico 1968, Spain entered 122 men and two women, the swimmers Mari Paz Corominas and Pilar von Carsten, who were accompanied by two young ladies from high society as chaperones by the COE.
Fortunately, we live in different times and different customs. Today, no one contrasts the “strong sex” with the “weaker sex” or the “beautiful sex”, expressions that were common fifty years ago. Alice Milliat died in 1957, surely satisfied to see that the snowball she had set in motion was growing. Her remains rest in the Saint-Jacques cemetery in Paris, the city where the Games have finally achieved parity, the dream of the old suffragette. It took more than the vote, but it has arrived.
You can follow Morning Express Sports onFacebook andXor sign up here to receive theDaily newsletter of the Paris Olympic Games.
