Breaking into Olympic Circles: Women and Parallel Versions of the Olympic Games 1900-1936

Abstract

Early versions of the Games organized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) after it was founded in 1894 were marked by the interplay of nationalistic discourse and friendly international competition.1 The first element of this article looks at how women entered the Games from 1896 to 1912. The Olympic Movement revised the ancient Greek Games to suit the tastes of anglophile French aristocrat, Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937).2 Coubertin's ideas for a modern version of the Olympic Games developed out of his concern for nationwide fitness in France and his internationalist outlook, whereby cooperation through sporting contests could replace military aggression.3 The Olympic Games therefore reflected transnational flows as they moved from venue to venue, stimulating increasing numbers of people to greater mobility in order to compete, spectate and officiate. As a special edition of the Journal of Olympic Studies has explored, the 1900 Paris Olympic Games particularly signaled the advent of modernity and sporting spectacle.4 What began as a relatively small festival nevertheless set a pattern that was copied by later tournament organizers in other sports.5 By the time that the Games returned to Paris in 1924, the travelling sporting mega-event had begun to evolve and the presence of female athletes would become more pronounced.6 However, the place of women within the early Olympic sporting spectacle remains contentious. It has been difficult to establish an exact number of female participants between 1896 – 1936, in part due to the uneven development of the Olympic Games themselves and in part due to the changing schedule. In Athens for instance, while Karl Lennartz has provided evidence that there were both documented references to a woman who ran the marathon distance in March 1896 before the official Olympic marathon race for men and another within twenty four hours of the sanctioned event, there remains a lack of clarity as to whether reports of ‘Melpomene’ and Stamati Revithi might refer to two separate competitors or the same person.7 So while important potential pioneers might be traced to the earliest modern revivals of Hellenic culture, it is also