Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) not deemed him ineligible ahead of the 1932 Olympics for allegedly accepting money to compete. Athletics honchos, including Avery Brundage, ruled that Nurmi had sacrified his amateur status on the altar of cash-compensated professionalism.29 The battle over amateurism had flared up once again.
Women’s Games
The Olympics echoed the gender and class structures of the time, but marginalization sparked an innovative response. In the 1920s, dissident athletes teamed up in solidarity with sympathetic supporters to organize alternative athletic competitions rooted in principles of equality.
To challenge IOC sexism, women and their allies organized alternative games, a vital yet largely forgotten act of political dissent. Everywhere women looked, the Olympic cards were stacked against them. The IOC, as led by Coubertin, opposed women’s full participation, as the minutes of the 1914 IOC general session made clear: “No women to participate in track and field, but as before—allowed to participate in fencing and swimming.”30 Discrimination was baked into the master plans.
Enter Alice Milliat, a French athlete and activist whose bold actions scythed a path for women’s participation in the Games. After the exclusion of women from track and field in Antwerp, Milliat founded the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI) on October 31, 1921. At its first meeting, the group voted to establish a Women’s Olympics as an alternative to the male-centric Games. In total four Women’s Games were staged, in 1922 (Paris), 1926 (Gothenburg, Sweden), 1930 (Prague), and 1934 (London), with participants coming mostly from North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
Milliat and the FSFI found a way into the Olympic structure, thanks to a highly placed, grudging ally, J. Sigfrid Edström of Sweden. In 1912 Edström, a longtime Olympic movement booster, founded the International Amateur Athletic Federation to govern Olympic track and field, with Coubertin’s blessing. In 1922, following the successful Women’s Games, Edström and his colleagues brought the FSFI under the umbrella of the IAAF. This opened a path for women’s participation in the Olympics, but the price to the FSFI was forfeiting a certain degree of autonomy to the IAAF. As part of that price, the FSFI had to rename its event the Women’s World Games to avoid mentioning “Olympics,” a foretaste of the hypervigilant defense of branding to come.31
The first Women’s Olympics in 1922 were largely a success. More than 20,000 people attended the single day of competition at Paris’s Stade Pershing, where athletes from five countries (Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Switzerland, and the United States) competed in eleven events, more than twice as many as the IOC would include when it finally allowed more women’s track and field events in 1928. Newspapers of the day reported favorably, if somewhat backhandedly, on the strides women were making in sports. According to the New York Times, 1922 “was notable for the development of women athletes in all branches of competitions fitting to their sex. Remarkable progress was made by them, and almost overnight, they assumed a place of great prominence in the world of athletics.” No longer were “girl athletes … a decided novelty,” but “capable of impressive performances.”32
Four years later at Gothenburg, the now renamed Women’s World Games were also a one-day affair, although with athletes from eight countries. In 1930, Prague played host to a three-day gathering featuring more than 200 top-flight female athletes from seventeen countries. Media coverage was typical of its day, if belittling by present-day standards. In an article titled “Girls Go to Prague,” one newspaper reported, “Nine girls from Vancouver B.C., young, athletic and socially prominent, accompanied by a chaperone, are on their way to Czechoslovakia.”33 Nevertheless, the event drew considerable public interest, with more than 15,000 spectators. The fourth Women’s World Games were held in London in 1934, with nineteen participating countries. Organizers added basketball to the slate of track and field events.34
In a way, the FSFI was undercut by its own success. By 1936 the group had increased membership from five to thirty countries and had secured allies in the IAAF, but, Mary H. Leigh and Thérèse M. Bonin argue, “no matter how determined they were and no matter how good their arguments were, women could not get very far without the support and alliance of the male sport establishment.”35 The IAAF had incrementally taken more and more control of women’s track and field and absorbed it into the Olympic schedule.
In a last-ditch effort to maintain control of women’s sports, the FSFI asserted that unless the IOC offered a full roster of events to women and afforded them a measure of representation at the IOC itself, they would cease participating in track and field events. Edström wrote Avery Brundage, then the top Olympic official in the US: “Madame Milliat had sent a letter asking that all Women’s Sport be omitted from the Olympic Games, as she wished to have separate Olympic games for women. The proposition was rejected.”36 In another letter he fumed: “I suppose you know that Mme Milliat’s federation has caused us so much trouble that we certainly have no interest at all to support it. We should like the whole thing to disappear from the surface of the earth.”37 In 1936 the FSFI folded, after serving great purpose.
One result of the FSFI’s activism was to induce the IAAF to include a handful of women’s track and field events at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics as an experimental trial (the discus, the running high jump, 100-meter dash, 800-meter run, and the four by 100-meter relay).38 Despite being disappointed with the limited number of events, the FSFI voted to approve the offer, although female athletes from Britain showed their disapproval by boycotting the Games. Meanwhile, traditionalists chafed at the inclusion of women. The minutes of the IOC Executive Committee reported: “A harsh discussion between Edström and [Reginald J.] Kentish took place as the former points out that the IAAF absolutely wishes to have the 4 women-events on the program. Kentish points out that in most countries the masculin [sic] and feminine sports are separated and he thinks that such a decision will not be very popular.”39
Edström and the IAAF eventually won out, with more and more women’s track and field events staged at the Games. Still, men debated which sports were appropriate for women. Sometimes, those who wished to limit the range of sports positioned themselves as progressive advocates of women’s athletics. For instance, Dr. Frederick Rand Rogers, the director of the Department of Health and Physical Education for the State of New York, adopted the approach of “more, rather than less, but of the right kind.” Cloaking paternalism and sexism in the respectable garb of science, Rogers argued for “less strenuous” sports for women, and opposed women’s participation in the 1932 Olympics.40
Alice Milliat and her colleagues used a classic inside-outside recipe for political change. They worked inside the corridors of power with IAAF and IOC power brokers while creating a viable alternative outside the IOC’s orbit—the Women’s Olympics. Their relentless pressure on the men who controlled the Olympics paid off in an early breakthrough for women in sport.
But an uphill battle still lay ahead. Many sports administrators were skeptical of women’s sports, including Brundage. While embroiled in a 1932 controversy over whether the athlete extraordinaire Mildred “Babe” Didrikson was an amateur or a professional, he remarked: “You know, the ancient Greeks kept women out of their athletic games. They wouldn’t even let them on the sidelines. I’m not so sure but they were right.” Didrikson had been suspended by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for alleged professionalism because she had appeared in an advertisement for milk. This was enough for Brundage to advocate suspension, although Didrikson was later reinstated.41 At the time Brundage was head of the Amateur Athletic Union, so his opinions carried weight. In 1949, as IOC vice president, he wrote: “I think it is quite well known that I am lukewarm on most of the [Olympic] events for women for a number of reasons which I will not bother to expound because I probably will be outvoted anyway. I think women’s events should be confined to those appropriate for women: swimming, tennis, figure skating and fencing but certainly not shot putting.”42
In
