“Olympic Games Doomed” and “No More Olympic Games,” read headlines published in London’s Times in 1924.

A century ago, British commentators called not only for their nation to withdraw from the Games, but some, more radically, for the end of the Olympics entirely. Rather than bringing together nations in friendly competition, many felt that the Olympic Games were only deepening global strife. Looking back on Great Britain’s continuously shifting history with the Games—and with the 1924 edition in particular—today reminds us why global politics always has the potential to spill over into the Olympic arena.

The 1924 Paris Games witnessed over 3,000 athletes from 44 nations compete in 17 sports. Coming almost exactly five years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the end of World War I, these contests carried clear international and political significance. For the French, that meant seeing their athletes succeed at almost any cost and using their host’s spotlight to fight back against international criticism.

Following a general ban by the International Olympic Committee on the representatives of the defeated powers from the war, all countries except Germany were invited back to the 1924 Games. To the French, German participation was unthinkable considering relations between the two nations, and so French officials didn’t invite Germany to compete.

But the atmosphere was now fraught among the hosts, the United States, and Britain, former wartime allies who found themselves in a state of strained relations due to the French Occupation of Germany’s Ruhr region.

In January 1923, after Germany failed to make a scheduled Treaty of Versailles reparations payment, French troops entered the German region of the Ruhr to take resources, primarily coal, by force. Britain and the United States were among a large group of nations that condemned the occupation and the soldiers’ treatment of the local population. In response, France used the Olympics as a means to push back against international criticism.

The Americans bore the brunt of French hostility, beginning with the May rugby final, among the earliest competitions to take place. The American team had comprehensively beaten the French 17-3, yet still the home crowd taunted their opponents, leading to fights between fans in the crowd. Jeers of the locals nearly drowned out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the tennis men’s singles competition, the victory of American Vincent Richards over Frenchman Henri Cochet produced more outbursts from the crowd. And back-to-back American diving victories upset spectators to the point where they threatened to throw the judges into the pool.

For the British, the primary incident came in boxing, where judges awarded French rookie Roger Brousse victory over Britain’s Harry Mallin, the defending Olympic boxing champion, despite the contest being very much in Mallin’s favor. Mallin immediately launched an appeal, showing bite marks on his chest inflicted by his French opponent. Brousse was ultimately disqualified, and Mallin went on to become the first and only British male to successfully defend an Olympic boxing championship. But this helped sour the British on the Games. This sentiment was compounded by controversies in which the British were not directly involved in, like a fencing controversy between the Hungarians and Italians that resulted in an actual duel.

The British athletes did achieve victories, notably that of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell in track, performances later immortalized in the 1984 movie Chariots of Fire. Nevertheless, the Times of London columnist Sir Harry Perry Robinson wrote in August, shortly after the conclusion of the Games, that they “exacerbate international bitterness instead of soothing them.” An editorial in the same edition bemoaned that “shameful disorder, storms of abuse, free fights and the drowning of the national anthems of friendly nations by shouting and booing are not conductive to an atmosphere of Olympic calm.”

1924 wasn’t the first year that the Brits had questioned their participation in the Olympic Games. By the time the International Olympic Committee (IOC) formed in 1894, Britain, the self-proclaimed home of “modern sports,” already had its own ingrained sporting calendar, revolving around events like Ascot, Lord’s, Henley, and Wimbledon. Its preference had always been for the plethora of sporting events it organized and officiated. The consequence was that for the inaugural Olympic Games of 1896, Britain was represented by just 10 little-known athletes, several of whom came from the staff at the British Embassy in the host city of Athens. Britain’s Olympic organizing body, the British Olympic Association (BOA), wasn’t formed until 1905, nearly a decade after its counterparts in the U.S. and France.

When Britain hosted the Olympics for the first time three years later, in 1908, the U.S.  dominated in track and field, winning 16 of the 34 titles (while Britain only mustered seven). This victory of the “professional” American college system established a general feeling of negativity among the British public toward an “unwanted” addition to the sporting calendar; one that served to further damage the British ego, which was continually knocked at the start of the 20th century both on and off the sporting field.

Because of this, for the outspoken British press, the early Olympic Games didn’t feel as much a forum for British excellence but rather evidence of the nation’s physical decline.  After Britain only finished third in the medals table in the 1912 Stockholm Games, the Duke of Westminster branded the team’s poor performance a “national disaster.” That’s where the desire for Britain to drop out of the Olympics started in earnest. Nonetheless, Britain went in the other direction in its preparations for the 1916 Games, appointing its first-ever professional athletics coach to compete against its rivals for cultural, economic, and military dominance, in a period of heightened chauvinistic nationalism. But preparations for those Games ended in the summer of 1914 following the outbreak of World War I. Upon the resumption of the Olympics in 1920, there was no money for anything beyond sending a team to Antwerp and certainly no desire for expressions of nationalism following four years of bitter war.

The Paris Games of 1924 was perhaps a high point of British Olympic apathy, but despite the complaints of some, the growing international standing of the Games meant that the nation continued. Today, Great Britain remains just one of six countries to have competed at every Olympic Games.

As the Games (and Britain) return to Paris a century later, the world has accepted both the positivity of the Olympics in bringing nations together in friendly competition and the international incidents that they are poised to generate.