Athletics at the 1924 Paris Summer Games

The 1924 Olympic athletics competition was held at the Stades Colombes, slightly north of Paris. The track was 500 metres and this was the last time that Olympic competition would be contested on other than a 400-metre track. The 1924 Olympic track & field events were later depicted in the Academy Award winning movie Chariots of Fire. The movie followed the exploits of two British sprinters, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, as they prepared for and then competed at the 1924 Olympic Games. But the actual star of track & field was the great Finnish distance runner, Paavo Nurmi. Nurmi won both the 1,500 metres and 5,000 metres, running those finals within an hour of each other. He also won the individual cross-country and ran on winning Finnish teams in the cross-country and 3,000 metre team races, winning five gold medals in all, still the most won by any athlete in track & field at a single Olympics.