IN PICTURES – A century before the 2024 Paris Olympics, Alice Milliat’s crusade for the Olympic recognition of women’s sport – Libération

Equality: Olympians are still runningfileFaced with the refusal of the International Olympic Committee to welcome women until the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, the tireless activist organized a Women’s World Games.

For Pierre de Coubertin, reinventor of the Olympic Games, in 1896, women’s place was in the kitchen, and certainly not on an athletics track or in a swimming pool. “The woman is above all the companion of the man, the future mother of the family, and must be raised with a view to this immutable future,” he wrote in 1901. He did it again in 1912: for him, the Olympic Games constitute “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism with […] female applause as a reward.” He had only had to reluctantly accept symbolic contingents of women at the Games, for example in tennis from 1920.

Largely insufficient for Alice Milliat, a multi-talented sportswoman, member of Fémina Sport, one of the first women’s sports clubs and president of the Federation of Women’s Sports Societies of France. She will continue to impose the presence of women at the Olympic Games, particularly in the major sport of athletics. She finally emerged victorious from her crusade against the old Olympic leaders who were forced to officially welcome sportswomen to the Amsterdam Games in 1928. Six years later she had even gone so far as to organize the Women’s World Games in Paris. A look back in images on her fight and that of the pioneers who succeeded in imposing women in the stadiums.

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