Sixteen nations sent roughly 250 athletes to Chamonix in the French Alps for what was originally billed as an "International Winter Sports Week" before being retroactively recognized as the first Winter Olympic Games. Events included figure skating, ice hockey, bobsled, and speed skating, with Norway topping the medal table and establishing Scandinavian dominance in winter sport that would last decades.
The Winter Games nearly didn't happen. Figure skating and a single hockey tournament had already appeared at the 1908 and 1920 Summer Olympics, and some International Olympic Committee members, particularly the Nordic countries protective of their own Nordic Games, resisted the idea of a separate winter event diluting their tradition.
A compromise event was staged at Chamonix under French organizational effort, carefully labeled a "sports week" rather than an Olympics to avoid offending Scandinavian sensibilities. Athletes competed in eight sports across eleven days in temperatures that occasionally dropped brutal enough to freeze the timing equipment. Norwegian speed skater and ski jumper Thorleif Haug became the breakout star, winning three gold medals and a bronze.
Only after the fact, in 1926, did the IOC vote to retroactively recognize Chamonix as the first Winter Olympic Games, and the event has been held (with wartime interruptions) every four years since, splitting from the Summer Games' calendar in 1994. Chamonix's cramped ice rinks and horse-drawn bobsled runs bear almost no resemblance to the multi-billion-dollar spectacles the Winter Games would become.