The 1924 Paris Olympics was a turning point in the history of the games

Paris

They worried about cost overruns. They assuaged grumpy Parisians. And they bickered over where to put new facilities.

They were the organizers of the 1924 Paris Olympics and, even a century ago, they knew that having it in the French Capital was no ordinary undertaking. But as France will remind you repeatedly, the City of Light is no ordinary host.

Whenever the Games come to Paris, the Olympic movement tends to take a pretty significant leap forward. The first time, in 1900, marked the second edition of the modern Games and the first to see competition open to women as well. When they returned 24 years later, Paris once again marked a turning point in the history of the Games.

Not only was it the first Olympics to be widely covered by the media, but the 1924 Games also went a long way toward defining the shape of the modern Olympics. Paris introduced the 50-meter Olympic swimming pool, a 45,000-seat Olympic stadium, and the first ever village built to house athletes.

Located near the stadium in Colombes, on the outskirts of Paris, it was made up of “portable wooden houses complete with running water,” according to the International Olympic Committee, “and also featured a post office, bureau de change, hairdressing salon and a restaurant.”

Until 1924, it was hard to consider the Olympics a serious endeavor—at least by current standards. The modern Olympics had begun in 1896 in its ancestral home in Athens and, four years later, visited the home of IOC founder Pierre de Coubertin in Paris for the first time. And to anyone who has seen the three-week, broadcast-fueled extravaganza the Games have become, the 1900 edition would be hardly recognizable.

For one, they included croquet, tug of war, and basque pelota. They also took five months to complete.

So by the time the Olympics came back to the French capital, the whole event was already a vastly different proposition. The 1920 Games had been awarded to Antwerp in Belgium as a gift to a region that had been ravaged by the First World War. But Paris was designed to be a more global spectacle.

“Twenty-four was the first time there was big media coverage,” says Olympic historian David Wallechinsky.

All that coverage gave rise to a raft of fresh stars in Paris, led by the American swimmer and water polo player Johnny Weissmuller, who took home three gold medals. Weissmuller would go on to be better known for his career in Hollywood than for his feats in a Parisian pool. (In the 1930s, Weissmuller became the original silver-screen Tarzan.)

Strangely, despite the success of 1924, it would take Paris more than six decades to bid for the Summer Games again. The French capital entered the race unsuccessfully for 1992, 2008, and 2012. Only in 2017 did it strike a deal with Los Angeles and the IOC to bring the Olympics back to Paris, after a full century of waiting.