How Alice Milliat brought women into the Olympics

Analysis: the Frenchwoman played a huge role in establishing the first Women's World Games 100 years ago this month

History credits Frenchman Charles Pierre Fredy, Baron de Coubertin, with the revival of the Olympics of Ancient Greece and the organisation of the first Games of the modern era in Athens in 1896. Despite his great admiration for the sporting ethos of English public schools, de Coubertin's ideal Olympian was the individual adult male. Leaving aisde the internationalism, pacifism and quest for excellence championed by de Coubertin’s Olympic ideals, he was certainly elitist, racist and notoriously misogynistic by today's standards. He once stated that "an Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, anaesthetic and improper".

For de Coubertin, women physiologically and temperamentally were not capable of striving for, much less achieving, the aspirations of citius, altius, fortius in competitive sport. Consequently, only a handful of female competitors took part in the first and subsequent iterations of the Games and were confined to events deemed appropriate, such as swimming, tennis and croquet. There were no events for women in track and field whatsoever up to and including the 1924 Games in Paris (celebrated in Chariots of Fire), even though one of France’s biggest sports stars in the 1920s was the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen.

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From Histoire TV, trailer for Les incorrectes, Alice Milliat et les débuts du sport au féminin

Against this backdrop of exclusion,