Day 2 Charles Jewtraw of the
United States won the first
gold medal of the games in the
500-meter speed skate, making him the first Winter Olympic champion.
Day 4 Sonja Henie of
Norway, at just eleven years old, took part in the ladies' figure skating competition. Although she finished last, she became popular with fans and went on to take gold at the following three Winter Olympics.
Day 6 Figure skater
Gillis Grafström of
Sweden became the first athlete to successfully defend his Summer Olympic title at the Winter Olympics (having won a gold medal in
1920).
Day 8 The Canadian ice hockey team (
Toronto Granites) finished their qualifying round with three wins against Czechoslovakia (30–0), Sweden (22–0), and Switzerland (33–0), scoring a total of 85 goals and conceding none.
Day 10 Finding themselves in the same situation as Gillis Grafström, the Canadian ice hockey team is the last to defend their Summer Olympics title at the Winter Olympics successfully. Canada would dominate ice hockey in early Olympic competitions, winning six of the first seven gold medals awarded.
Epilogue Taffy Abel (1900–1964) was an Indigenous
Ojibwe ice hockey player. He was the first Native American in the
Winter Olympic Games (1924 Hockey Silver Medal), the 1924 Flag Bearer for the
United States at the 1924 Winter Olympics, the first Native American in the
National Hockey League (1926), and a
Stanley Cup champion (1929 and 1934). At the closing ceremony, a prize for
alpinism, a sport not officially included in the Olympic Winter Games, was awarded by
Pierre de Coubertin to
Lt Col Edward Strutt, the deputy leader of
British expedition, on behalf of their attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1922. For the first time in the history of the modern Olympics, the host country (in this case,
France) failed to win any gold medals, finishing with three bronze medals. The same outcome occurred at the
next Winter Olympics in St. Moritz where
Switzerland won only a single bronze medal, the lowest ever output by a host nation at an Olympics. Later host nations to finish without gold medals included
Canada at the
1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal,
Yugoslavia at the
1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, and
Canada for a second time at the
1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. In 1925, the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to organize the Olympic Winter Games every four years, independent of the Olympic Games proper, and recognized the International Winter Sports Week as the first Olympic Winter Games in retrospect. The final individual medal of Chamonix 1924 was presented in 1974. The
ski jumping event was unusual because the bronze medalist was not determined for fifty years. Norway's
Thorleif Haug was awarded third place at the event's conclusion, but a clerical error in calculating Haug's score was discovered in 1974 by skiing historian
Jakob Vaage, who further determined that
Anders Haugen of the United States, who had finished fourth, had actually scored 0.095 points more than Haug. This was verified by the IOC. On 12 September 1974, Anders Haugen, at the age of 85, came to Norway and was presented the bronze medal by Anna Maria Magnussen, Thorleif Haug's youngest daughter. In 2006, the IOC confirmed that the medals awarded to the 1924
curling and
military patrol teams were official. The IOC verified that curling was officially part of the program, after the
Glasgow Herald newspaper filed a claim on behalf of the families of the team. == Events ==