Born in Paris on January 1, 1863, Pierre de Coubertin has gone down in history as the recoverer of the Olympic Games. A teacher and athlete (he excelled in pistol shooting), he was inspired by the model of English schools and the competitions that were organized in the second half of the 19th century.
The promoter of the Olympic Games. He came from a noble family, his grandfather was the first Baron de Coubertin, and was educated at the Jesuit school on Rue Madrid, in Paris, before pursuing a military career at the Saint Cyr academy, founded by Napoleon Bonaparte. He became interested in sport as a way to improve the French educational system, with the aim of “regenerating the French race through the physical and moral reeducation of the country’s future elites”, in need of renewal, he thought, after the defeat in the Franco War. -German from 1870.
Coubertin’s sporting concerns later led him to international dissemination and crystallized at the Sorbonne Congress in 1894, where the recovery of the Olympic Games and their quadrennial celebration was approved. There it was also decided that Athens would organize the first, in 1896. For historical reasons, but also because in Greece they were promoting strictly local Games whose first edition should have been held in 1892 and had been postponed until 1896. They joined together in this way the two initiatives. Also at that congress a burning issue was analyzed: the separation between amateurism and professionalism. The International Olympic Committee was founded and the Greek businessman and writer Dimitrios Vikelas was placed as its first president. Coubertin succeeded him in 1896 and remained at the head of the Olympic movement until 1925, in the longest mandate to date (29 years), ahead of the 21 years of presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch.
It was in 1908, on the occasion of the London Games, when Coubertin pronounced one of the sentences that have marked his biography: “The important thing is not to win, but to participate.” In fact, he was quoting, and this is what he explained at the time, the Anglican bishop of Pennsylvania, who, in a ceremony organized in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in honor of the athletes, had said: “The important thing in these Olympics is not “so much to gain but to take part.” Nor, although it is often attributed to him, does the motto “citius, altius, fortius” belong to him in purity. He delivered it at the opening of the first Games, but it was an earlier creation of the French Dominican Henri Didon.
Pierre de Coubertin left numerous written works, speeches and more than a thousand articles, and his review with today’s perspective does not leave in a good place, to put it kindly, the promoter of modern Olympism. He was a strong supporter of colonization and considered sport a useful instrument to “discipline the indigenous people.” He proclaims that “the white race is essentially superior, to which the others owe allegiance.” He was reluctant to the female presence in the Games: “What interest would a small women’s Olympiad have next to the great men’s Olympiad? Nothing practical, without interest, nothing aesthetic and even more: incorrect… In our conception, we must continue to seek the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athletics… with female applause as a reward.”
Despite this misogynistic position, there were women (few) in the first editions, since the organization was delegated to local entities. But there were no women’s athletics until 1928, when Coubertin was no longer president. The last Games held during Coubertin’s life were those in Berlin 1936, which he did not attend, but he had words of praise for the German people and said that “the glorification of the Nazi regime has been the emotional shock that has allowed the development they have experienced.” ”.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin died bankrupt, due to the expenses of his Olympic representation and the serious illnesses of his two children, while he was walking in a park in Geneva, on September 2, 1937.