25 November 2024

By Hélène Rémond

Hélène Rémond has read Sophie Danger’s book Alice Milliat, La femme olympique about Alice Milliat, the woman who helped organize the first Women’s Olympic Games.

The Olympic craze spread during the Paris Games last summer. The name of Pierre de Coubertin was on everyone’s lips to refer to the founder of the modern Olympic Games. But who knows about Alice Milliat? The water sports exhibition at the Musée national de la Marine in Brest (see Hélène’s article of the water sports exhibition at the museum here) does mention her, so visitors could barely miss her. She is the woman who helped organize the first Women’s Olympic Games hosted in 1922 at the Pershing stadium in Paris, bringing together five countries and 77 female athletes. The 1924 Paris Games had a few female athletes – 135 women out of 3,089 competitors — but the Olympics hardly welcomed their participation beyond just a few events, such as swimming and tennis. There were no women’s competitions in most sports, including track and field, football, rowing, cycling and even gymnastics. The athletic competitions were set up at the 1928 Amsterdam Games. The craze about the extraordinary destiny of Alice Milliat could now be soaring with Sophie Danger’s book Alice Milliat, La femme olympique.

Sophie Danger is a French journalist who first worked for L’Équipe, the nationwide daily newspaper dedicated to sports. She has directed documentaries and is now a contributor for Ablock news website about sport and women. Alice Milliat, La femme olympique is her third book. Published by Éditions Les Pérégrines, the paperback is the biographical story of Alice Milliat, who was born Alice Million in Nantes, in 1884, and died in Paris, in 1957, at the age of 73.

More than a century ago, she successfully led women’s inclusion in the Olympic Games, while the 2024 Olympic Games have achieved parity with equal numbers of women and men athletes for the first time. Sophie Danger’s book reports on the way Alice Milliat was a pioneer of women’s sport. Yet, young Alice had done everything in her power at school to escape the boredom of hygienic gymnastics classes. A keen sportswoman – she was a swimmer and hockey player –, it’s during a stay as a nanny in London, at the age of 18 that she discovered rowing on the Serpentine in Hyde Park and fell in love with the sport. She married in England before coming back to France, in Nantes and then in Paris, where she used her strength of conviction to unite the fledgling women’s sports movement, before embarking on the battle of her life: women’s access to the Olympic Games. Having lost her husband who died unexpectedly, it was a shattering blow but she followed her work in favor of sport, all the more so as “sport, and more specifically rowing, helped her to cope with horror”, writes Sophie Danger.

“An Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper”, said Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Alice Milliat had to face the misogynist rhetoric of the beginning of the 19th century. She was convinced women’s sport had its place in social life the same way as men’s sport. It could strengthen the body and mind. To counter one of her opponents, Swedish athlete Sigrid Edström, fourth president of the International Olympic Committee, Milliat created the Fédération des sociétés féminines sportives de France in 1917 and launched the International Women’s Sports Federation in 1921.

In sport’s history, competitive rower Alice Milliat has definitely played a tremendous role in increasing recognition of women’s sports and changing the mentalities, even though there are things that remain to be done. Sophie Danger’s book helps Alice Milliat to come out of anonymity as she was sidelined after the Second World War, and delves the reader into a captivating journey with a compelling portrait of Alice Milliat.

“I have relied mainly on the press of the time, official reports from sporting bodies, civil status records and the wonderful work of researchers […]. From her childhood to her arrival in London, I didn’t find much material to draw on […]. I have used my imagination to fill in the gaps”, writes the author in a note at the end of her book. The reader learns that “rowing for glory has never been her goal, what she wanted was to row for the example, aware that her sporting prowess could help the cause.”

Alice Milliat, La femme olympique by Sophie Danger, Éditions Les Pérégrines, ISBN: 979-10-252-0628-7, paperback, 200 pages, €19.

You can read an extract of the book online here.