A springboard for Chamonix and the local skiing industry
The first Olympic Winter Games boosted Chamonix’s national and international reputation as a winter tourism destination and triggered a concerted effort to promote the resort and winter sports as leisure activities.
Situated in the French Alps, Chamonix is best known for its proximity to Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps at 4,810 metres, and as a popular and cosmopolitan ski resort. The ski areas of Le Brévent and Grands Montets – just two of the five that extend along the Chamonix valley – attract 650,000 visitors a year alone. Together, the five ski areas offer approximately 150 kilometres of pistes, which are served by 65 ski lifts. Measuring over 20 kilometres in length, the Vallée Blanche is the world’s longest off-piste ski descent. Access to it is provided by the Aiguille du Midi cable car, which, even in the summer months, is used by 5,000 people a day.
Since organising the inaugural Olympic Winter Games, Chamonix has become an experienced host of major winter sports events. The setting for the 1937 and 1962 FIS Alpine Ski World Championships, it is also a prestigious stop on the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup circuit. In January 2021, for example, it staged two men’s slalom World Cup events as part of the Arlberg Kandahar, a legendary event on the Alpine skiing calendar that the resort hosts in conjunction with several other Alpine destinations. In the summer months, meanwhile, events such as the Mont-Blanc Marathon and the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc attract runners in their thousands to this corner of the French Alps, showing that there is more to Chamonix than just skiing.
Hosting the Games allowed Chamonix to rival resorts such as St Moritz and Davos across the border in Switzerland. Although it had an established reputation as France’s leading winter sports centre before 1924, the resort built on the prestige provided by staging the Games to forge further ahead of its domestic rivals and appeal to an international audience, developing its transport and accommodation infrastructure in the process.
Chamonix also harnessed the potential of Alpine skiing. Despite the fact that the sport was not on the 1924 Games programme, it had become increasingly popular in Scandinavian countries. The local authorities were not slow to recognise its ability to drive the resort’s development. They spent the years after the 1924 Games modernising the resort, embarking on a number of ambitious projects. These included the construction of the Plan Praz cable car in 1927, followed three years later by the opening of a second cable car, Le Brévent. The Aiguille du Midi cable car, which provides spellbinding views from as high as 3,842 metres, opened in 1955, with Le Flégère carrying its first passengers a year later. The creation of such facilities allowed the Chamonix winter ski season to take off, with the influx of visitors from across France and further afield enhancing its image as a stronghold for Alpine sports, mountaineering among them.