Pierre de Coubertin is known for having participated in the creation of the modern Olympic Games. He also participated in the latter and even won a medal, but not for France…
Stone coubertin. This is a name inseparable from the modern Olympic Games. The Frenchman is at the origin of the revival of this event, in 1892, almost 1500 years after the disappearance of the Olympic Games of ancient Greece. It was finally in 1894, during the International Congress of Athletic Revival, that his project was ratified, with the return of the Games two years later, to ancient lands, with the Athens Games of 1896.
Since then, thirty-three editions of the Summer Olympic Games have taken place, including 17 in Europe and three in Paris. However, the flame had not returned to the capital since the 1924 Games, a century ago. From 1924, the Games were supplemented by the Winter Olympic Games, the last edition of which in France dates back to 1992 in Albertville.
Advocating a “healthy mind in a holy body”, Baron Pierre de Coubertin did not only put sport at the heart of the events. Until 1954, artistic events were also present, such as sculpture or literature. The other original aspect of the Games is amateurism, present since the 1980s. This is why professional NBA players could not participate in the Games until 1992, in Barcelona, with the famous Dream Team of Michael Jordan , Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. It is also indirectly for this reason that football teams are still limited to hopefuls during the Olympics (with an exception for three players over 23 per team) or that rugby union does not appear among the Olympic disciplines.
And Pierre de Coubertin himself participated in the Olympics as an amateur too. But if he defended the practice of sport to the point of promoting it in schools in particular, he did indeed compete as an art lover. The historian, educator, teacher, writer and politician was in fact, in his spare time, a poet who himself composed more than 1000 texts during his life. During the Stockholm Games in 1912, the Frenchman entered the literature competition, won by the duo Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbath, for their work “Ode to sport”. However, these two people do not exist, and behind these pseudonyms hides one and the same competitor: Pierre de Coubertin! In order not to distort the competition and influence the judges, the father of the Olympics will indeed choose not to compete under his real name.
If artistic events have not been on the program of the Olympic Games for a long time, it is precisely because of the professionalization of the arts which took place in the 20th century. According to Pierre de Coubertin, “athletes” had to resolutely remain amateurs. A vision very far from what the Games are today, whose participants are often at the limit of professional activity and are part of the elite of their sport.