I DEOLOGICAL B ACKGROUND

For Pierre de Coubertin, history was “la première de toutes les sciences en importance et en efficacité éducatrice” (Müller, 1996b, 5). A chapter on the history of the IOC and the modern Olympic Games is therefore in order, especially as their origins go well back in time and as they have undergone many changes ever since they were established in 1894/86.

Though essentially starting out as the ambitious project of one man, the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, the IOC is one of the few international institutions that have survived the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century. Not only did it surmount the initial difficulties it had in rallying support and getting off the ground, but it also survived two devastating world wars, the Cold War and major crises such as terrorist attacks, boycotts and corruption scandals. The academic literature does not offer an explanation for this remarkable fact.

Sarantakes merely mentions in passing that “the Olympic movement has proven quite resilient” (2014, 327), while Hansen puts this longevity down to the IOC’s ability to reinvent itself, claiming that “når den olympiske bevægelse har overlevet de 20. århundrede skyldes det, at den international olympiske komité (IOC) har været i stand til å forny sig” (2004, 11).¹⁰ Yet the extraordinary success of the Olympics also be regarded as support for the IOC’s claim that the Olympic Movement, which is described in the Olympic Charter as a “universal and permanent action” (IOC, 2014, 11), has a general relevance that transcends temporal and geopolitical fault lines. As Hansen goes on to suggest, this universal character might be due to the protean and somewhat obscure nature of the Olympic philosophy (2004, 17). In view of its “vieldeutigen und damit breit interpretierbaren Symbolik” (Alkemayer, 2012, 251), it could easily be changed and updated to fit different contexts.

The reinvention of the Olympic Games and the birth of the Olympic Movement took place against the political, educational and philosophical backdrop of the late nineteenth century.

These three areas are closely interrelated and had a significant influence on the ideological underpinnings of the Olympics. At the political level, the period was marked by the

10 “[T]he Olympic Movement has survived the twentieth century due to the fact that the IOC was able

Prussian War in 1870/71 which France had lost and which led to the emergence of Germany as a unified nation-state. The defeat at the hands of the Germans had dealt a severe blow to the French self-esteem and caused a sense of national trauma. For Coubertin, who professed “un goût passionné pour l’histoire contemporaine”, the “terrible crise de 1870” only added to what he described as “nos échecs successifs … dont je me sentais humilié”

(Müller, 1986c, 52). Accordingly, he envisaged education as the way forward to restore France to its former glory.

As a means of overcoming this feeling of humiliation, he advocated placing the focus on the new generation that represented hope for the future and openly called for “une grande réforme pédagogique” (ibid.) For him, it was primarily through education that society could be reformed. From 1883 to 1886, Coubertin had toured the UK and Ireland and become acquainted with the concept of education through sports as it was widely practised at English public schools and universities. In line with the ideas of the famous British educator and headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold, he regarded it as an effective way of providing young people with an upright character and strong morals that would ultimately lay the foundation of a healthy and outward-looking society. Contrasting the lack of physical education in France with the development of athleticism at schools and universities in the UK, he became a fervent campaigner in favour of strengthening the role of sports in education. Aiming to introduce a similar form of physical education in France, he developed his idea of a “pédagogie sportive”, which he regarded as “tout un plan de formation morale et sociale dissimulée sous le couvert des sports scolaires” (cited in Durry, 1996, 16), which shows that for Coubertin both personal development and social advancement could be promoted by physical exercise. “Character”, as Coubertin proclaimed in his closing speech at the 1894 Sorbonne congress that restored the Olympic Games, “is not formed by the mind, but primarily by the body” (cited in MacAloon, 2006, 545). He hoped that, as a result, sports education would transcend the sort of narrow-minded nationalism that had led to the recent war and thus help solve and prevent international conflicts. As Alkemayer puts it, Coubertin propagated “eine auf den modernen Sport gegründete Pädagogik als Instrument der Krisenlösung” (2012, 254). Although the starting point for his interest in sports education had nationalist overtones in that it was motivated by the defeat of the French in the war against Prussia, he insisted that he had revived the Olympic Games “thinking not merely of France or England, Greece or Italy, but of humanity in general” (cited in Girginov, 2010a, 10). This combination of national self-confidence and international peace seems to be a contradiction in terms, but it is nevertheless at the heart of Olympism. From the beginning, Coubertin highlighted the interplay between individual nations united by enthusiasm for peace and their coming together at an international festival as an expression for their peaceful ambitions. To

his mind, a truly international sporting competition in which all the nations of the world participated might promote mutual understanding and respect between people of different countries, races and social classes.

This essentially humanist approach was influenced by prominent philosophical ideas of his day, notably the tenets of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (cf. Müller, 1986c, 36) and many others.¹¹ One of the most important philosophical influences on Coubertin’s thinking was Auguste Comte’s positivism (cf. the study by Simonovic-Duci, 2004, and Wernick, 2001, 15 n. 40).

Comte, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, had advocated social progress based on strictly scientific principles and a religion of humanity whose priests were sociologists of a sort (Alkemeyer, 2012, 261), similar to Coubertin’s disciples of Olympism. Like Comte, Coubertin took the view that society needed to be equipped with a strong moral foundation and discipline in order to reign in the egoism of its individual members. Nonetheless, in contrast to Comte’s systematic theories, Coubertin’s own philosophical statements often remain eclectic and vague, as many critics have noted with respect to his conception of Olympism.¹² One example is the grandiloquent passage quoted by Durry in which Coubertin expounds his project with a mix of theoretical reflections on history, world peace, social equality and the youthful body:

Je rebronzerai une jeunesse veule et confinée, son corps et son caractère par le sport, ses risques, et même ses excès. J’élargirai sa vision et son entendement par le contact des grands horizons sidéraux, planétaires, historiques, ceux de l’histoire universelle surtout, qui,

engendrant le respect mutuel, deviendront un ferment de la paix internationale pratique. Et tout cela pour tous, sans distinction de naissance, de caste, de fortune, de situation, de metier.

(Durry, 1996, 16).

It seems plausible that Coubertin used this rather flowery language as a countervailing force to the sober discourse and depressing political reality of his day. The fin de siècle environment in which he lived was marked by social strife and pessimism; there was a widespread feeling that Western civilisation was in decline and that its post-Enlightenment societies were drifting apart. Coubertin’s mythological, romantic and aesthetic project of the Olympic Games offered an antidote to the feeling of bleakness as it promised a higher, richer sphere of meaning in contrast to the toils of every-day life. Significantly, the Olympic Games initially did not only comprise sports competitions but art exhibitions as well. Art and sport

11 For a comprehensive overview of the complex "history of ideas" that had a bearing on Coubertin’s conception of Olympism, cf. Loland, 1995.

were aesthetic practices around which people of all walks of life could rally and which could prove to be a unifying force in society.

In order to promote his project, Coubertin turned to Ancient Greece and its athletic tradition as a model for his own progressive educational project. In his mind, the study of antiquity – or “Hellenism”, as he termed it – would help attain the ideal unity of body, mind and soul, of society and individual, that he attributed to the Ancient Greeks. So far, the benefits of a classical education had been reserved to the ruling class that attended the public schools and universities Coubertin had visited in Britain. Through the reinstitution of the Olympic Games, he aimed to make the Greek ideal of humanity available to all members of society.

Of course, Coubertin’s take on Antiquity is based less on historical facts than on an idealised reworking of stereotypical ideas. As Tomlinson points out, Coubertin “excelled at hyperbole”

(2004, 148). There was a general enthusiasm for all things Greek in his time, given that archaeology was having a field day with the rediscovery of Troy and other ancient sites;

Coubertin had notably admired the archaeological reconstructions of ancient Olympia at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. By creating a romanticised link to this mythological past, he aimed to endow his modern educational project with symbolic meaning. As Rider and Wamsely note, the fact that “the Olympic Games, Ancient and Modern, are shrouded in similar mythologies […] is part of the source of their popular appeal” (2012, 291).

In the 1890s, Coubertin’s project finally came to fruition. After years of giving lectures, writing reports and organising congresses on sports and physical education, he voiced his intention to revive the Olympic Games for the first time in November 1892 (MacAloon, 2006, 525). On his travels in the preceding years, he had built up the international contacts without whose support he would not have been able to found the Olympic Movement. In 1894, he convened the International Athletic Congress at the Sorbonne, a gathering of sports associations and their representatives from Europe and North America, under the pretext of discussing amateurism in sport. His secret goal, however, was to convince the delegates of the need to see the Olympic Games restored. The Congress was a huge success; it led to the establishment of the International Olympic Committee, elected Dimetrios Vikelas as its first president and determined that the first modern Olympic Games were to be held in Athens in 1896. Athens, of course, was a symbolic choice: by associating the modern Olympic Games with their birthplace, Coubertin could claim continuity and enhance the impact and significance of his Olympic Movement.