Alice Milliat, the sports activist who enabled women to participate in the Olympic Games

A swimmer, hockey player, rower, she challenged the male sports authorities, the International Olympic Committee led by Pierre de Coubertin. In 1922, she organized the first all-women World Olympic Games.

Alice Milliat does not have the fame she deserves at all. While almost everyone knows the name of Pierre de Coubertin, the inventor of the modern Olympic Games, few people know who Alice Milliat is, born in France in 1884. Moreover, on her tomb in a cemetery in Nantes, for a long time, there was neither name nor first name.A burial as modest as my work is great“, as his biographer writes.

Alice Milliat, a great swimmer, hockey player, and rower, is the one who allowed women to participate in the Olympic Games, by daring to challenge the male sports authorities, notably the International Olympic Committee, led by Pierre de Coubertin, for whom the only role of women should be, as in the old tournaments, to crown the winners, when doctors claimed that sport risked killing them, because of their bones, of course, fragile as crystal.

But things began to change during the First World War. Alice Milliat, convinced that the “Women’s sport has its place in social life just as much as men’s sport“, took advantage of the absence of men who had gone to fight to take their place on the fields. She created women’s clubs all over France, before founding the International Federation of Women’s Sports Societies at the end of the war. And faced with the IOC’s repeated refusals to let women participate in athletics events, she therefore organized the first all-women World Olympic Games in 1922.

However, the competition was so successful that the IOC finally gave in. In 1928 in Amsterdam, the IOC took advantage of the opportunity to absorb her federation. Alice Milliat then retired before dying in 1957 amid general indifference, the Vichy regime having completely erased her legacy by once again banning women from participating in public competitions. A setback whose effects would be felt for a long time, since it was only this year, in Paris, for the first time, that there would be exactly the same number of women as men competing in the Olympic Games. Objective achieved? No, a right, equality, finally respected.