How it unfolded
Sixteen years before a Winter Olympics existed, the organizers of the London Summer Games adopted figure skating as an official event at the Prince's Skating Club, which had an artificial ice surface. In the men's singles, Sweden's Ulrich Salchow, already a five-time World Champion, defeated fellow Swede Richard Johansson. At the same Games, Britain's Madge Syers won the women's gold, and Russia's Nikolai Panin won the special figures event held only that year, becoming Russia's first Olympic gold medalist. Pairs skating also made its debut at these Games. Only a handful of European nations took part and the event was treated as a sideshow within the Summer Olympic program, but it was the first time this figure-focused club sport had appeared on a formal international stage.
Why it still matters
Without this debut, figure skating would have had no established basis to be included when the Winter Olympics were created in 1924. The titles Salchow and Syers won that day remain the official first page of Olympic figure skating history, and Panin's victory is remembered as the symbolic starting point of the dominance Russia would build in this sport over the following century.