British Women's Team at a Train Station in London ahead of departure for the first ever International Track Meet for Women 1922

Paris 1922 British Women's Team at a Train Station in London ahead of departure for the first ever International Track Meet for Women held on the 20th August 1922 at the Pershing Stadium in Paris France. The first women's Olympic Games was a one-day track meet in Paris in 1922. Eighteen athletes broke world records before 20,000 spectators. Although women had competed at the IOC's Games since 1900 initially in tennis and golf, and later in archery, gymnastics, skating, and swimming. These events were initiated by Games organizers and sympathetic international federations like La Fédération International de Natation Amateur. If IOC founder and president Pierre de Coubertin and some of his colleagues had had their way, these competitions would never have been held. The combined opposition of the IOC and the IAAF kept women out of the most prestigious sport on the program, track and field. But in their buoyant, post-suffrage enthusiasm for new frontiers, women in many countries were competing in track and field in record numbers and achieving record times. If they couldn't enter de Coubertin's Games, Milliat decided, then they would have an Olympics of their own. (Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)