8. Olympic Summer Games
Olympic Medals in the games of 1924 in Paris
378 Medals in 19 Sports in 126 Events
When the Olympic Games were held in Paris from May 4th to July 27th, the organizer did not yet know that he had organized the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix a few months earlier, as these were only retrospectively recognized as such in 1926. The two competitors for the 1924 games were Amsterdam and Los Angeles. It was a personal matter for Baron de Coubertin that the games were given to Paris for the second time after 1900, because he wanted to forget the chaos and extremely poor organization of the time. His power in the IOC was not as strong as it was in his prime. Therefore, he started a final coup. He sent a circular to the IOC members announcing his retirement after the 1924 games and linked it with a "humble" request. He wrote to the members that no one, as the innovator of the Olympic Movement, wanted to contest the right to comply with his request that the Paris Games be organized and that the 1928 games be given to competitor Amsterdam without choice. After the games, he retired from active events and remained an IOC honorary president.
The opening ceremony took place on May 4th, for the first time the new Olympic motto "faster, higher, stronger" was quoted. The number of athletes exceeded 3,000 for the first time, and over 1,000 accredited journalists reported on the games worldwide. Tennis was held for the last time until it was reinstated in the Olympic program in 1988. The Paris Games coincided with a politically and economically favorable time, which was not called "the golden twenties" for nothing. The United States spent billions of dollars building Europe, people's lives changed because they used products they had never known before. The streets of the cities changed from carriages and horse-drawn carriages to cars and trucks. Radio was a new medium; people dared to try to broadcast the football final between Uruguay and Switzerland live. A huge success that was heard all over Switzerland, even if they lost the game! The closing ceremony was on July 27th.