100 years ago: Women's Olympic Games in Monte Carlo

If the founder of the modern Olympics had anything to do with it, the Games would have remained an almost exclusively male affair. "Impractical, uninteresting, clumsy and, I don't hesitate to add, inappropriate" said Pierre de Coubertin of the suggestion that women should be allowed to participate as athletes. The primary role of women at the Olympics, the French baron wrote in 1912, was to "crown the victors."

Only a few female athletes were allowed to compete back then, and only in sports that those in the higher social circles regarded as appropriate for women: tennis, golf, rowing, archery and figure skating. 

But de Coubertin hadn't taken the determination of his sports-loving compatriot Alice Milliat into account. The Frenchwoman was a tireless advocate of equal rights for women in sports, and in 1919, she applied to the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to allow women to compete in athletics at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp. The IAAF refused. 

Female athletes from seven countries 

"I hit a massive wall of rejection, which led directly to the creation of the Women's Olympic Games," Milliat later recalled. She organized the competitions, which were held from March 24 to 31, 1921, at a clay-pigeon shooting range in Monte Carlo. About 100 female athletes from five nations – France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland – competed in mainly athletics disciplines. 

In October 1921, the Women's Sports Federation (FSFI) was established, with Milliat as its president. The FSFI staged a repeat of the Monaco event two years later and in addition created the Women's World Games, which were first held in Paris in 1922. 

The men maintain control 

However, the FSFI continued to lobby for women to be allowed to compete at the Olympics and at the 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam, women track and field athletes were allowed to compete for the first time, albeit in just five disciplines. 

"The male sports functionaries at the IAAF and especially the IOC (International Olympic Committee) feared that by allowing women to compete, they would lose control of international sports in the lkong term," sports historian Annette Hofmann told DW. "The idea was to prevent any loss of power by including women's competitions. Thus, they could decide which sports and disciplines were considered respectable for women." 

Milliat's "emancipatory thought" was suppressed by the federations, said the professor at the University of Education in Ludwigsburg: "From then on, male officials again controlled the further development of women's sports." 

The scientist wonders how women's sports would have developed if they had remained independent and the FSFI had not been dissolved in 1936 under pressure from the IOC. 

"Would the women's competition in the marathon [Olympic since 1984], women's wrestling [2004], women's boxing [2012] or even women's ski jumping [2014] have become Olympic earlier – in the Women's Olympic Games? Or would women have had no chance to develop their sport at all?" 

Posthumous tribute 

Milliat, who passed away at the age of 73 in 1957 is now commemorated in a statue that stands in the French National Olympic Committee building in Paris. The statue was unveiled in a ceremony on March 8, marking International Women's Day, with IOC President Thomas Bach sending his greetings via video.

In 2007, 50 years after Milliat's death, Rule 2, Paragraph 7 was enschrined in the Olympic Charter, which states that one of its goals is "to encourage and support the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures."  

And a century after the first Women's Olympic Games in Monte Carlo in 1921, the Tokyo Olympics are set to be the first in which nearly as many women as men will compete – if the Games actually go ahead despite the COVID-19 pandemic.