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November 23, 2024
The speech that fizzled, then set the Olympic movement ablaze
Sports

The speech that fizzled, then set the Olympic movement ablaze

By Jason Diego / July 22, 2021

The day had been meticulously planned. After years of research, the 29-year-old baron would go public with his idea to revive the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece in the modern era. He’d chosen the old Sorbonne in Paris and the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the French athletics association to deliver his speech. It was a grand setting for a big idea: a sporting competition to bring nations together and learn from one another — to promote internationalism and world peace, no less.

The speech fell flat.

The audience was “not negative, but there was no support,” says David Wallechinsky, author and a founding member of the International Society of Olympic Historians. “He had a good speech and the wrong audience — an audience that was not sympathetic enough or open minded enough.”

“Coubertin realized that he hadn’t pulled it off, but he was persistent,” Wallechinsky adds. “He realized that idealism wasn’t enough. He had to get down to the nitty gritty and get the work done.”

That the speech is so revered — the original 14-page manuscript went for $8.8 million in 2019, becoming the most valuable item of sports memorabilia ever sold at auction — is testament to what happened next.

The Olympic spirit

The original Olympic Games manifesto, written in 1892 by Pierre de Coubertin, on public display at Sotheby's in Century City, California, on October 23, 2019.

In 1892, France was yet to take organized sports to heart, says Stephan Wassong, an expert in the life of Coubertin and head of the Institute of Sport History at the German Sport University Cologne. Physical activity and organized sports were part of the military program but not the school curriculum, unlike the US and Britain.

Coubertin, a strong advocate for sports’ educational value, believed it “was good for the brain” and that “the mind and the body could work together, and they helped each other,” Wassong explains. He’d traveled to England, where sports were already a part of students’ daily lives at boarding schools, and where local events like the Wenlock Olympian Games, established in 1850, brought together competitors across a number of disciplines.

But it was where sports could dovetail with his other passion that gave Coubertin’s idea an edge. A sworn internationalist whose writings detail an “awakening” at the World Fair of 1878, he became involved in the world peace movement, which like so many other movements, was centered in Paris at the time.

Having witnessed Englishman Hodgson Pratt propose an international student exchange to promote tolerance, at the 1891 World Peace Conference in Rome, “Coubertin took up this idea and … linked it with sport,” says Wassong.

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This “wasn’t a popular concept,” says Wallechinsky, particularly among leaders in an age of colonialism and competition between European nations’ imperial ambitions. But Coubertin believed in his idea.

When the night at the Sorbonne came, the speech latched on to the popular revival of all things Hellenic, and used the reputation of the Ancient Olympic Games to support his idea. Coubertin praised the advancement of sport from Germany to Sweden, Britain to the US, lamented France’s slow start, and called sport the “free trade of the future.”

Sport was put on the same pedestal as the scientific and engineering innovations of the day: “It is clear that the telegraph, railways, the telephone, the passionate research in science, congresses and exhibitions have done more for peace than any treaty or diplomatic convention,” Coubertin said. “Well, I hope that athletics will do even more. Those who have seen 30,000 people running through the rain to attend a football match will not think that I am exaggerating.”

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The speech “clearly laid down the educational fundamentals of the Olympic idea — of Olympism,” says Wassong, “and its mission to build a better world through sport.”

But though his lofty rhetoric fell on deaf ears that night, Coubertin had the will and the resources, and campaigned around Europe for his modern Olympic Games.

Two years later he returned to the old Sorbonne, and in the very same room, plans were formalized for the first Games. His message had finally been heard. In 1896, the Olympics were reborn in Athens, Greece.
Left to right: Willabald Gebhardt of Germany, Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France, Jiri Guth of Bohemia, President Dimitros Vikelas of Greece, Ferenc Kemey of Hungary, Aleksei Butovksy of Russia, and Viktor Balck of Sweden at the first meeting of the International Olympic Committee, organized for the 1896 Olympic Games.

A complex legacy

Coubertin was not without considerable flaws. He did not initially believe women should participate in the Games (women first competed in 1900) and with his upper-class mentality he held “at best condescending, and at worst, actually racist” views of some countries, says Wallechinsky.

He also said that the Olympic movement “needed constant updating, and to be adapted to the prevailing zeitgeist,” Wassong notes. So, while the movement is indebted to Coubertin, certain views he held should, by his own admission, be gladly left behind and disassociated from the Games.

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In 1896, 12 countries competed. For Tokyo 2020, invitations to the Games were sent to over 200 nations, states and territories. Today the Games is almost unrecognizable in its scale, diversity and degree of sporting prowess. But the spirit of Coubertin’s speech lives on in its friendly competition.

“We’re going to have 11,000 or so athletes in Tokyo,” says Wallechinsky. “The vast majority — I would say 80% or more — will have no chance whatsoever of winning a medal, and they know it … But most of them are there to set a personal record, to set a national record, to do the best they can. I think that de Coubertin would have loved that.”

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