The Olympic Games is far from a set menu when it comes to the lineup of events. While the 100-meter dash, gymnastics, and swim events are expected courses each four-year installment features new flavors, while others are taken off the table. and takes a few off the table as well. Breakdancing called “Breaking” in Olympic parlance, will make its debut at the Paris Games, while karate, baseball, and softball have departed. But if you ask me, the most impactful Olympic losses happened long ago. Chariot racing, which never really made the jump from the Ancient Olympic Games, might look pretty neat with a drone follow cam. I think Pankration, a grappling event believed to be invented by Theseus when he defeated the minotaur in the labyrinth, is ready for its renaissance.

A century ago, when the Olympics last time landed in Paris, the lineup of sports looked dramatically different. We wanted to see just how much that menu has changed over the last century. Let’s face it, we’ve outgrown the telegram, the icebox, and the silent film. Our sports look a little different, too. Here’s a look at five competitions from the 1924 Paris Games that won’t be served up in 2024.

Art

Yes, you read that right. For nearly 40 years, art competitions were included on the Olympic program, awarding medals across five disciplines: music, architecture, literature, painting, and sculpture. Eventually these Olympic competitions were discontinued in 1954 due to concerns about amateurism versus professionalism, but not before Olympic gold medals were awarded to nearly 50 participants.

The 1924 Games were considered the apex of the Olympics’ art era with almost 200 participants over all disciplines. During these Games, Hungarian Alfred Hajos earned a silver in the architecture event, adding to his two swimming golds from the 1896 Games and becoming one of only two participants to ever win an Olympic medal in athletics and art.

Art wasn’t without its controversies. In 1924 there were no medals awarded in the music competition—judges decided that none of the musical compositions was worthy of the Olympics. Judges in architecture also did not award a gold medal that year.

Rope Climbing

A short-lived Olympic competition within gymnastics, rope climbing only made it into four Olympics (in 1896, 1904, 1924, and 1932) before getting cut down after the 1932 Games. The competition format was simple: the athlete to climb to the top in the quickest time won. Climbers could only scale the smooth, unknotted rope with their hands (no feet allowed), covering 25 feet (the 1896 Games required 41 feet of climbing and only two athletes reached the top). Rope climbing was also part of the all-around gymnastics competition.

Czech gymnast Bedrich Supcik won the 1924 gold medal in his first ever rope climbing competition, posting a time of 7.2 seconds. The event originally judged similar to gymnastics, and an athlete could be awarded a perfect 10 the rope in under 9 seconds, but after a 22-way tie for first, judges decided to award the gold medals based on time, locking Supcik’s place in Olympic history.

French Cane Fighting

Canne de combat, a French martial art using a wooden cane as a weapon, was a demonstration sport at the 1924 Games, and a nod to the host country’s history. Similar to fencing, “La Canne”, as it’s often called, features two competitors battling each other with slightly tapered, chestnut canes. It was originally considered a form of protection for upper-class citizens in large cities like Paris, but earned a large following in the sporting world.

In 1924, the sport featured a single match between a college professor and a French La Canne champion named Beauduin. The winner has been lost to the annals of history.

Tandem Cycling

And you thought your tandem ride home from the Margarita Night at your local taco joint was scary. How about pedaling a tandem bicycle on a sloped velodrome for an Olympic gold medal? No this is not a drill, tandem cycling was a real live event at the 1924 Games (and for many years after). Two-person teams once went head-to-head (and clip-to-clip) in the velodrome for Olympic glory. The event was finally removed after the 1972 Munich Games.

The 1924 edition of this psychotic pursuit involved five teams, with two semi-final heats, one bye round, and a three-man team final. The French team of Lucien Choury and Jean Cugnot prevailed in the final, with Denmark and the Netherlands taking second and third respectively. It was later reported that in between the semi final and final, Dutch rider Maurice Peeters polished off an entire bottle of cognac to quell the nerves. Bold move, Cotton.

Running Deer Shooting

Shooting is still a big part of the Summer and Winter Games, but in the early parts of the 20th Century, these competitions were a little more dramatic. One of the most celebrated was the 100-meter running deer competition. In this event, a deer target mounted to a carriage was pulled 25 yards in four seconds, and participants would have to shoot the “animal” from a distance of 100 meters. The speed at which the target moved was not uniform, as the carriages carrying them were sometimes simply rolled down hills. Different areas of the target carried different point values, and the shooter with the most points at the end of 50 deer runs won.

American John Keith Boles . The career army officer would go on to serve in World War II and would never compete in another Olympic event.

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Pablo Vigil will never forget his first taste of mountain running in Switzerland.

As a twentysomething runner in the mid-1970s, Vigil had completed his collegiate track and cross country career at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado, but was hungry for more. There weren’t any established professional training groups and few professional sponsorships at the time, but Vigil found his way to Boulder because he had heard Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter was starting a racing team.

Living in a rented mobile home in Boulder with several other runners, Vigil improved considerably training with the Frank Shorter Racing Team. He competed for the U.S. squad that earned the team silver medal at the 1978 World Cross Country Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, racked up several top-10 finishes in domestic road races and, by early 1979, lowered his marathon personal best to 2:18:32.

An Unlikely Invitation

That summer, he was invited to run the Sierre-Zinal race, a 31K (19.2-mile) trail race that connects several mountain villages between Sierre and Zinal, in the Swiss canton of Valais. Back then, trail running was in its infancy, but it was already vibrant in Europe. Vigil was told Sierre-Zinal was the biggest and most competitive mountain running race in the world—an event that drew cross-country runners, marathoners, fell runners, and Nordic skiers who were known to train by running trails—so he was eager to give it a shot.

Not only was the course and its 7,200 feet of total vertical gain harder than anything he’d ever run,  it turned out to be the most competitive race of his life.

“I had run some of the early trail races in Colorado, like the Pikes Peak Marathon and some other local ones, and those were great, but it was nothing like what was happening in the European scene,” says Vigil, who draws part of his heritage to the Taos (Tiwa) Native American tribe of Puebloan people. “It was a huge race, and when we started up the mountain, holy shit! The first 50 runners were out for blood. That was a different kind of running.”

Competing against top mountain runners from Switzerland, Italy, the UK, and dozens of other European nations, Vigil remembers the aggressive style of racing—bumping elbows, legs, and shoulders—along the narrow singletrack trails that climbed more than 6,000 feet out of Sierre as thousands of local residents cheered along the course.

Vigil was a talented distance runner, but he was gutsy, too, and didn’t have any fear of flat-out racing. Not ruffled by the more experienced European runners, Vigil, wearing a pair of original Nike Waffle Racers, blasted to the front midway through the race and never relinquished his lead, winning in a new course-record time of 2:33:49 as a helicopter filmed overhead for live TV.

Although trail running in the U.S. had started to develop in popularity, it was mostly centered around the niche sport of ultra-distance trail running that began to flourish after Gordy Ainsleigh completed the 100-mile Tevis Cup equestrian event on foot in 1974, a feat that led to the formation of the Western States Endurance Run. In Europe, though, trail running was booming on steep, rugged mountain race courses.

“At the time, a lot of the European runners were pretty arrogant and saying that the Americans were soft,” recalls Vigil, 71, a retired school teacher who lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. “Back then, they were saying Americans were soft in skiing, soft in other sports. And I was thinking, ‘Oh, man, that ain’t true. We got the talent here in the U.S. We’re just as badass as the Europeans. We’ve got the mountains. We’ve got the altitude. We just need to get our asses over there and start kicking some ass in those kinds of races.’”

Vigil wasn’t the first U.S. runner to win the race—elite American marathoner and mountain running pioneer Chuck Smead had won it in 1977 and cajoled Vigil into running it two years later—Vigil was the first multi-year champion and, arguably, the race’s first legendary runner after winning it three more years in a row.

Just as importantly, Vigil became a Sierre-Zinal evangelist, encouraging other American runners to compete in the event since the 1980s. His success and advocacy, in part, paved the way for numerous elite U.S. runners to test their mettle on the course, with several producing top-five finishes over the years,including those by Jay Johnson, Joe Gray, Megan Kimmel, Jim Walmsley, Max King, and Bailey Kowalczyk (fifth, last year). But Megan Lund (2010) and Stevie Kremer (2014) are the only other American runners to win the race other than Smead and Vigil.

“It was my first taste of real European trail racing. And yeah, the crowds! It was next level,” Lund says. “There was never a dull moment on the course. At some point, it felt like the course was remote and there were people everywhere cheering, and I thought, ‘How do these people get up here?’ You would never see this in America.

“After the race, I signed hundreds of autographs on spectator’s race programs, and I had never done that before,” she adds. “And the craziest thing was, the next year when I came back, there were posters of me all over town, and I was being asked for my autograph right when I got off the train in Sierre.”

Sierre-Zinal Celebrates 50 years

Sierre-Zinal is celebrating its 50th edition this year, on August 12, and it’s just as prestigious as it’s ever been. Known as “the race of the five 4,000s”—a reference to the majestic 4,000-meter-high summits that overlook the race—it’s remained a prominent event in the trail running world because of its stunning locale, the fast-and-furious racing from the star-studded international fields it attracts each year and the festive community support from the enthusiastic spectators.

It also paved the way for other popular, high-energy races, like the and the Mont-Blanc Marathon festival of races in Chamonix, France. (And it created a model that the race directors of the and are trying to replicate in the U.S.)

“A lot of races in Europe have enormous spectator support, tunnels of crowds that are deafeningly loud,” says American Eli Hemming, one of the top contenders in the men’s field. “It’s so exciting as a runner to compete in an atmosphere like that.”

As one of the six races of the competitive , the men’s and women’s elite races are stacked with talented runners from around the world. The first 12K (7.4 miles) of the course sends runners up a near-continuous climb from 1,900 to 6,500 feet. They continue climbing to a high point of nearly 8,000 feet at the 24K (15-mile) mark, before dropping 2,500 feet over the increasingly steeper final 7K (4 miles) to the finish line in Zinal, where, dead-legged and delirious, they’re greeted by hundreds of local villagers and thousands of runners from the citizen race that started before the elite runners. There are 6,500 runners registered to run Sierre-Zinal this year.

Sierre-Zinal 2023: Who to Watch

Kilian Jornet, the world’s preeminent mountain runner and ultrarunner, has won Sierre-Zinal a record nine times since 2009, most recently in 2021. Unfortunately, he’s sidelined with a hip injury this weekend and relegated to assisting . In his stead, hard-charging Swiss runner RĂ©mi Bonnet, 2022 Golden Trail World Series champion and winner of last summer’s Pikes Peak Ascent in Colorado, has already stated his intent on wanting to win the historic race in his home country.

Bonnet’s biggest competition will likely come from Kenya’s Patrick Kipngeno, last year’s Sierre-Zinal runner-up who won the 7.5K (4.6-mile) uphill mountain race at the world championships in Austria, Eritrea’s Petro Mamu, the 2016 winner who placed third last year, Philemon Ombogo Kiriago (Kenya), who finished fifth at Sierre-Zinal last year and was the runner-up in the 15K (9.3-mile) mountain race at this year’s world championships, and Robert Pkemoi (Kenya), who took fifth at earlier this year.

Other top names to watch in this year’s race include Robbie Simpson (UK), Elhousine Elazzaoui (Morocco), Matthias Kyburz (Switzerland), Cesare Maestri (Italy), and Americans Joe Demoor and Eli Hemming. Demoor, 33, from Carbondale, Colorado, won the Vertical K at the 2022 Skyrunning World Championships in Ossola, Italy, while Hemming, a 28-year-old triathlete-turned-mountain runner from Salida, Colorado, won the 23K Broken Arrow Sky Race near Lake Tahoe in June and then took second in the prestigious Mont Blanc Marathon in late June in Chamonix, France.

Another fast-rising American runner making her Sierre-Zinal debut is Salt Lake City’s Sophia Laukli, who will be a top contender in the women’s race. The former University of Utah and 2022 Olympic Nordic skier is now a Salomon-sponsored pro trail runner who won the 42K Marathon du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, France, in June, and took second at the 22K DoloMyths Run in Canazei, Italy last month.

Swiss runner Judith Wyder is another frontrunner of the deep women’s field after winning the DoloMyths Run, along with Kenya’s Philaries Kisang, the runner-up finisher last year and the silver medalist in the 7.5K vertical race at the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships on June 7 in Innsbruck, Austria.

Dutch runner Nienke Brinkman, last year’s Golden Trail World Series champion and a 2:22 marathoner, is coming back from an early season injury and is out to prove she’s equally as good on trails as she is on the roads. Other top contenders include American Allie McLaughlin, who won two races at the 2022 Golden Trail World Series Finals and the vertical mountain race at the last year’s world championships in Thailand, and USA’s Tabor Scholl (ninth last year at Sierre-Zinal), as well as Ireland’s Sarah McCormack, Germany’s Daniela Oemus, Kenya’s Lucy Wambui Murigi, Spain’s Nuria Gil, and China’s Miao Yao.

Back to the Future

Trail running has evolved considerably since Vigil reigned over the European trail running world as a four-time Sierre-Zinal champion. Back when he ran, Vigil vividly remembers aid stations handing out raisins, chocolate, small cubes of cheese, and even paper cups filled with locally produced wine. Nowadays, there’s an elite-class of professionally sponsored mountain runners who specialize in sub-ultra distances bolstered by trail running supershoes, sophisticated smartwatches, and advanced sports nutrition supplements. Sierre-Zinal can be viewed via premier livestream coverage throughout the world, but it’s still broadcast on live TV throughout Switzerland and draws thousands of local spectators.

Sadly, as trail running attracts more prize money and sponsorship opportunities, it has also attracted dopers. Both of last year’s winners, Mark Kangogo and Esther Chesang, were disqualified and suspended after failing drug tests. This year’s race carries a prize purse of approximately $25,000, plus a bonus of $5,700 for a runner who breaks the men’s (2:25:35) or women’s (2:49:20) course records. But the race has made .

Vigil was disturbed to hear that news last year, mostly because he always considered mountain running to have a higher moral code than the sponsor-controlled, money-infused competitiveness he witnessed on the track and roads. Even after winning Sierre-Zinal in 1982, Vigil went on to win several U.S. marathons and lower his personal best to 2:15:19, and continued racing as a competitive master’s runner on the roads and trails into his 60s. But his lifetime highlights, he says, are primarily tied to memories of racing Sierre-Zinal.

He’s gone back to watch the race numerous times over the past three decades, both because he’s still hailed as a past champion and because it’s in his blood. (The footprints of each of the race’s champions are commemorated in a plaster-casted “wall of fame” near the finish line in Zinal.)

This year, Vigil will be back on the starting line to run with many of the event’s past winners and legendary runners. (“More like run, hike, crawl, and slither to the finish line,” he jokes.) He’s also looking forward to witnessing the pure grit and grind of fast-paced mountain running he so cherished when he was a younger man.

“We didn’t have all this high tech stuff, but it was super badass running,” Vigil recalls. “It’s different from what’s evolved in ultrarunning. The tone that was set in mountain running back then was about kicking ass or getting your ass kicked, and at the front of the pack at Sierre-Zinal, it continues to be that way.”

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At bedtime last week, legendary American distance runner Melody Fairchild regaled her 7-year-old son Dakota with tales of the he plans to run this year.

One of the biggest road races in the world for the past several decades, the race sends 40,000 runners through the streets of Boulder, Colorado, on a point-to-point race that ends at the University of Colorado (CU) football stadium, full of cheering spectators and fellow runners.

“I told him it’s an amazing feeling to run into that stadium,” Fairchild says. “When you hit the field, the whole crowd is cheering for everybody. You feel like they’re cheering for you. He had this huge smile on his face.”

And if 50,000 people cheering isn’t enough, there’s also the famous slip-n-slide, numerous bands playing on the course, runners and spectators wearing outrageous costumes, and the military jet flyover by the Colorado Air National Guard you can feel in your bones. Named America’s All-Time Best 10K, it’s likely to be one of the biggest parties you’ll ever attend.

Fairchild recounted for Dakota her experience as the U.S. captain for the Bolder Boulder’s first International Team Challenge professional race in 1998.

“I remember looking out the window and seeing the stadium full. I was so nervous, I thought I was gonna vomit all over the floor,” she says. “When I walked out and they introduced me as the local hometown girl, the whole crowd roared.”

Fairchild ran her first Bolder Boulder at age eight. She went on to win the citizens’ race three times (1989, 1990, 1991) when she was a record-setting high schooler, became an All-American and NCAA champion at the University of Oregon, and then qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 10,000-meter run and marathon as a professional runner. But the Bolder Boulder has always held a special place in her heart, which is why she has continued to run it through the years and why she’s so eager to introduce Dakota to it.

How it Got Started

The idea for the Bolder Boulder germinated in the mind of a father watching his five children participate in all-day track meets. It was the summer of 1978 at the upswing of the original American running boom, and runner and local businessman Steve Bosley had grown frustrated with the disorganized events and parents berating their children for not running fast enough.

Bosley, then 37, reached out to his friend, Boulder resident and international running icon Frank Shorter, a two-time Olympic medalist in the marathon, for help designing a race that would serve their community and promote the sport of running. The race would not only become a Colorado icon, it set a gold standard for road races around the world and helped elevate women’s running in unprecedented ways.

RELATED: The Man Who Brought Running to Boulder

During the spring of 1979, Cliff Bosley, the current race director, went door to door with his Boy Scout troop, passing out posters to encourage neighbors to run his dad’s inaugural race. The poster announced a 4,000-participant cap and enticed Boulderites to “Run with Frank Shorter and Ric Rojas!” for a mere $6.50 entry fee. (Rojas was another local elite athlete who would go on to win the inaugural race in 1979. His daughter, Nell Rojas, a current professional runner, won the women’s citizen’s race 40 years later in 2019.)

Bosley recalls giving a man in his front yard a poster who threw it back in his face in disbelief. “‘Yeah right, 4,000!’ the man scoffed. “I was just a 12-year-old kid. You believe everything your parents tell you. I thought, ‘Dad says it could happen—why won’t it?!’”

The inaugural race saw 2,700 registrations. The next year, it doubled in size and live entertainment was added to the celebration. Participation continued to soar in the ensuing years and decades, eventually reaching 50,421 in 2010. With an average of 45,000 finishers over the past 10 years, it’s now the seventh-largest road race in the nation and the largest Memorial Day celebration in the U.S.

Pioneering Prize Money

From its inception, the Bolder Boulder 10K offered equal prize money for the female and male winners. In 1984, it created a separate elite race from the citizens’ race. There was also a deliberate split in the women’s and men’s elite race so that both races could be showcased equally and covered live on the local TV broadcast. Today, it offers one of the largest non-marathon prize purses in the U.S., but this did not come without a lot of work.

Initially road races were precluded from paying prize money to athletes because it changed their amateur athlete status, preventing them from competing in the Olympics. In the early 1980s, Steve Bosley, then the president of the Bank of Boulder, worked with two local attorneys, Frank Shorter, and TAC (The Athletics Congress which was then the name of the national governing body for the sport; now it’s known as USATF), to create a mechanism using trust accounts for athletes to earn prize money. It was then paid into athletes’ individual trust accounts so they could draw living and training expenses. At the time these accounts were called TACTRUST Accounts, and the Bank of Boulder was the steward of 95 percent of all of these accounts on behalf of both American and international athletes from around the world.

Promoting Women’s Running

One of the most circulated photos of the Bolder Boulder 10K is that of Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon champion, winning the 1981 race— the first time the race finished in the University of Colorado’s Folsom Stadium. But that same year, Ellen Hart, then 23, won the women’s race—although she says there was no finish line tape for the female winner.

“It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen,” she recalls. “Since I was a little girl, I had wanted to go to the Olympics. I thought, Oh my god. This is like the Olympics! I traveled to races all over the world and the BB was my favorite race.”

Hart would move to Boulder in 1982, and then win the race again in 1983 before the four-year reign of Portugal Olympian Rosa Mota. In many ways, Hart says, her success in the Bolder Boulder launched her career as a professional athlete.

She went on to place 11th at the inaugural women’s U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in 1984, set an American record in the 30K, and won 18 world championship titles in triathlon and duathlon racing. “In terms of women’s sports, the Bolder Boulder was certainly more forward-thinking than any other race I ever attended,” Hart says.

The race organization was also ahead of its time when it began the Women’s High Altitude Training Camp, something it did not offer for men, in 1989. The 100-day program was designed to bring five talented post-collegiate female runners to Boulder to train prior to racing Bolder Boulder. Runners were placed in volunteer host families, provided an elite coordinator and a trail guide, and given access to a local gym and the university’s track to train.

New Jersey runner Inge Schuurmans McClory was a member of the 1990 team.

“I really didn’t feel worthy of national attention, but I applied for the program not even thinking I was going to get in,” she says. She was not only accepted, but she fell in love with Boulder and stayed.

“I went to graduate school here. I met my husband here. I coached cross country and track at CU. It sort of was the launching pad for the rest of my life, and I owe it to the Bolder Boulder and that high-altitude training camp,” says McClory, now a physician’s assistant who has trained cardiac patients—the Brave Hearts—for the Bolder Boulder since 2000.

Since 1996, there have consistently been more women (average 53-54 percent) than men completing the race. Cliff Bosley attributes this to his mom creating a walking division in 1984 so that her father, diagnosed with prostate cancer, could participate.

“We kind of look at it as a placeholder,” says Bosley, “You come in as a walker and now you’re on the continuum. Let’s help you become a jogger. Let’s help you become a racer.” This exemplifies the Bolder Boulder’s rallying cry, “Oh Yes You Can!” that it established in 1979.

Building Community Through Running

The Bolder Boulder has always been defined by its strong community involvement, which includes an eager network of volunteers, aid stations staffed by local running groups, and the thousands of spectators who line the streets and fill the stadium. Historically, the race donates more than $100,000 to local nonprofits and community groups that volunteer. Even during the pandemic, the race still found a way to contribute.

“Knowing we could not stage the Bolder Boulder in-person, we created a virtual event called the VirtuALL 10K and offered it at no cost,” Bosley says. Thousands of T-shirts, designed for the 2020 race that went unused, were donated to shelters.

Another Bolder Boulder program that supports the community is the BB Racers Club. Created in 1996, the program prepares children for the race, so their experience is a positive one. Initially started as a middle school program, this club now includes elementary schools. Children who are signed up are given a special training program, coach, and starting wave. Fairchild’s Boulder Mountain Warriors club, of which her son Dakota is a participant, is training a large number of BB Racers this year.

Bosley is prepared for up to 45,000 participants at this year’s race on May 29. And just as they did 44 years ago, race organizers will serve participants a sack lunch and send them a postcard in the mail with their finishing place, pace, time, and ranking in their age group.

“I can still remember checking the mailbox every single day until it came,” says Fairchild. “It makes me emotional just thinking about how much attention to detail they’ve always given hundreds of thousands of people. They care so much. It’s not an accident that they are the best 10K in the world.”

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