Winter Olympics History
We can say the Winter Olympics began in 1908 when figure skating made an appearance at the Summer Games in London. Ten-time world champion Ulrich Salchow of Sweden, who originated the backwards, one revolution jump that bears his name, and Madge Syers of Britain were the first singles champions. Germans Anna Hubler and Heinrich Berger won the pairs competition.
Organizers of the 1916 Summer Games in Berlin planned to introduce a “Skiing Olympia,” featuring nordic events in the Black Forest, but the Games were cancelled after the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
The Games resumed in 1920 at Antwerp, Belgium, where figure skating returned and ice hockey was added as a medal event. Sweden's Gillis Grafstrom and Magda Julin took individual honors, while Ludovika and Walter Jakobsson were the top pair. In hockey, Canada won the gold medal with the United States second and Czechoslovakia third.
Despite the objections of Modern Olympics' founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin and the resistance of the Scandinavian countries, which had staged their own Nordic championships every four or five years from 1901-26 in Sweden, the International Olympic Committee sanctioned an “International Winter Sports Week” at Chamonix, France, in 1924. The 11-day event, which included nordic skiing, speed skating, figure skating, ice hockey and bobsledding, was a huge success and was retroactively called the first Winter Olympics Games.
It was felt that Winter Olympics’s sports, dependent on snow, ice and cold weather, gave an unfair advantage to countries with cold climates, where skiing and skating are often normal parts of life.
For their part the Scandinavians feared that the Winter Olympics would threaten their own Nordic games, which had been held every four years since 1901.
Warm weather in St Moritz, Switzerland forced the cancellation of the 10,000m speed skating contest in the 1928 Winter Olympic Games. Then 18 hours of rain led to the postponement of an entire day's events.
In the 1932 games in Lake Placid, the Americans were obliged to bus in snow from Canada, to the general mirth of the European countries.
By 1976 artificial snow was being used, but storms and strong winds continued to disrupt the games in Sarajevo in 1984 and in Calgary in 1988.
The 1980 games were also an organizational disaster. The transport system was unable to cope with the volume of traffic, and many tickets were left unsold even though people wanted to buy them.
In response to concerns over the increasing costs and logistics of the Winter Olympics, the IOC voted in 1986 to alter the schedule. Instead of being held in the same year as the Summer Olympics, they were now to be held two years after the Summer Games.
Seventy years after those first cold weather Winter Olympics Games, the 17th edition of the Winter Olympics took place in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994. The event ended the four-year Olympic cycle of staging both winter and summer Games in the same year and began a new schedule that calls for the two Games to alternate every two years.
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