Canada had beaten Great Britain 19-2, Czechoslovakia 30-0, Sweden 22-0 and Switzerland 33-0 on their way to the final, racking up 104 goals in just four games in the process, and the final against their nearest rivals was described not only as “the highlight of the Games” by an anonymous article dug up by the Chamonix tourist board, but also as a match which somewhat “resembled a street fight.”

The article reads that “it ended with numerous injuries”, saying “the players did not wear any protection, no shin guards, no gloves, no helmets. Only an elegant beret or cap.”

“Teams were picked not only on past results, but on ability to get away for several weeks – you had to take a boat to Europe – and to pay your own expenses…”

Cut to the next morning and back to 2018. We’ve taken the Plan Praz gondola to 1999m and are wondering whether the person who built the lift did so with the specific intent of irritating people who like round numbers. We’re also very much enjoying the view from the slope above the station, reaching from the Grandes Jorasses at 4208m over to the shard-like peaks of the Grand Charmoz (3445m), Aiguille de Blaitière (3522m) and Aiguille du Plan (3673m).

There’s no lack of snow in the Alps this season anyway, but as Eric Fournier, mayor of Chamonix, recently put it, when your resort has slopes reaching 3300m, “if we will not be able to ski here, we will not be able to ski anywhere.”

We’re wearing, amongst other things, gloves and helmets, and are ready to clip into our skis, but there’s not an “elegant beret or cap” in sight. Perhaps the age of chivalry is dead after all.

Chamonix has become one of the most famous ski resorts in the world in the 125 years since a pair of skis first arrived in the French town from Norway in the baggage of a Chamoniard traveller. There are many reasons for this.

One of the reasons was the railway line that passes through the Chamonix valley, which was inaugurated in 1901, opening the town to winter visitors. Another, of course, was the attention drawn to the resort by the first ever Winter Olympics in 1924.

All of this development has created an intense culture of winter sports in Chamonix. The resident population is about 10,000 but seasonal workers and tourists can add up to another 100,000 to the resort on a busy winter weekend. Whitelines Magazine calls Chamonix “the original home of alpine sport”. If you want to make the most of a powder day you need to be on the first lift or have some serious local knowledge, and the gondolas and chairlifts are a curious mix of beginners and intermediate riders ready to crowd the pistes and seasoned skiers kitted out with skins, transmitters and harnesses heading further into the snow.

Often lost amongst all this is the fact that the town hosted the first ever Winter Olympics. It’s grown so much since then and such is the buzz over the riding in the resort (and the après, which is far from lacking) that it wouldn’t be difficult to arrive ignorant of the fact that the first Games happened there and leave none the wiser.

But they did happen, and they were certainly a factor in the growth of the town of Chamonix, even if they didn’t bring quite the international circus to town that they would have done today.

“They weren’t nearly as big as they are now,” says Bill Mallon, a co-founder and later president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, and the man behind the wonderful Chamonix 1924 Twitter account.

“It was mostly a European event, with the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan competing (the latter two in the summer games).”

A total of 32,683 spectators attended the 1924 Winter Olympics, most of whom, Bill explains “were wealthy dilettantes who were holidaying in Chamonix. Few were there [specifically] for the Olympics.”

They would leave with a nice historical boast though nonetheless, however spontaneous or coincidental their attendance at the Winter Games.

During the Olympics the athletes were all housed in hotels around Chamonix. Bill notes the hotels, the pre-existing bobsleigh run and of course the remarkable mountains as some of the reasons the town was selected to host the Games.

The contract was first signed between the IOC, the French Olympic Committee and Chamonix on 20 February 1923. An ice stadium was to be built capable of holding two ice hockey pitches and two open areas for figure skating – the biggest in the world – as well as a ski jump that could handle 60 metre jumps. It all had to be built in less than a year. The opening ceremony was scheduled for 25 January 1924, and despite some serious concerns along the way, in the end, it was all delivered.

There was only one problem. The snow. Just when all the venues were built, a month before the opening of the Games, 160cm of snow fell in 24 hours.

Nobody had seen anything quite like it. 600 workers shoveled day and night to get the snow off the ice and remove it with hand-pulled sledges. The work continued through January, and when the snow thawed, thankfully the weather turned cold enough to freeze it. The conditions were, at last, ideal.

“It doesn’t sound altogether too dissimilar to what happened here a few weeks back,” remarks a Chamonix local on a lift up the mountain in Planpraz.

He’s referring of course to the unimaginable levels of snow that have fallen on the French Alps this winter. In Chamonix, lifts, resorts and roads were shut for days because of it. They were still working to get the highest lifts back open when we left. We’re told some locals and tourists based high in the resort couldn’t reach their accommodation and had to sleep in schools as they waited for the snow to thaw for a brief period in the weeks before our arrival. We see countless cars snowed deep into their own driveways.

Whoever is clearing the roads in the resort, however, is doing a splendid job, and now that it’s bluebird in Chamonix, all of that snow isn’t the worst thing in the world. Our first day on the mountain in Planpraz had been a slow start waiting for more lifts to open, but for the days that followed, in Le Brévent, around Les Grands Montets and in La Flégère and Le Tour in particular there was a lot of fresh snow to be found.

One small traverse from a lift in Le Tour allowed us to descend through a powder wonderland before returning to the lift through a flurry of trees – though the increasing presence of ice as the week went on made it clear that a new coat of snow was needed soon (and which we understand did indeed arrive a few days later).

When you spend a few days in Chamonix you quickly realise that there’s a special atmosphere. You wake up to the 4810m outline of Mont Blanc. You watch gear-heavy skiers queue at Midi on a ridge with near vertical drops on either side, at over 3800m, to get their chance to ride the famous Vallee Blanche. You become accustomed to each of the resorts in the town, what they have to offer on and off the piste, and you understand how something as globally significant as the first Winter Olympics could play as small a part in the modern day narrative of the town as they do today.

There’s a real feel of innovation and boundary-pushing in the resort. People pushing their own boundaries and those of the resort with it.

There’s talk in town of a skier who was recently saved with a 30m rope after falling down a crevasse near Midi the previous week. Just off the pistes speedflyers ride off cliffs with parachutes and leave ski tracks you have to be careful not to follow if you do stray out of the boundaries. In summer there is even more tourism from mountaineering and the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, widely considered to be one of the most difficult ultra-marathons in the world, is raced over the unforgiving Chamonix terrain.

The mountains demand your utmost attention in Chamonix. There isn’t always a chance to glance back at the history.

The 1924 bobsled track is now lost in the forests under the Aiguille du Midi gondola. The hill of the ski jump remains in the town. And ice hockey is still played a stone’s throw from where that famous medal match took place between Canada and the USA 94 years ago.

The first ever Winter Olympics may not be remembered everyday in Chamonix, but it’s certainly a place as distinguished and ambitious as the host town of such a historically significant event should be.

Click here to read the rest of our February ‘Olympic issue

Do It Yourself

We flew from Edinburgh to Geneva with EasyJet and took the hour-and-15 minute transfer to Chamonix with Mountain Drop-Offs. We stayed five nights at La Chaumiere Lodge in and rented skis from Intersport.

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