Coubertin's Ideal — The Birth of the Modern Games

Some fifteen centuries after the ancient festival vanished, at the end of the nineteenth century there was a man who dug up its memory and dreamed of a festival where the world’s youth would once again compete in a single place. He was the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin. What he raised up was an ideal that placed value not on victory or reward, but on the very act of training body and mind and competing in mutual respect. Yet to turn a lofty ideal into a real event, there was a wall that could not be avoided. How to prepare a venue, how to gather the athletes, and who would pay the cost. The modern Olympics stood, from its very first step, within the struggle between ideal and money.

Calling the ancient ideal back into the modern age

The nineteenth-century France in which Coubertin lived was sunk in the memory of defeat. He believed that the key to rebuilding the nation lay in training the body and mind of its youth, and he was strongly drawn to sport as a form of education. In time his interest turned toward the festival of ancient Greece. It was also an age in which excavation had brought the ruins of Olympia into view, and the existence of the contest-festival once dedicated to the gods was being retold among the people of Europe. Coubertin resolved to revive that ancient ideal in the modern age.

In 1894, he gathered sports figures from various nations at the Sorbonne in Paris and made his case for his own vision. At this congress it was decided to hold, every four years, an international competition modeled on the ancient festival, and to establish an International Olympic Committee to run it. For the site of the memorable first Games, Athens — the homeland of the Games — was chosen. Coubertin is said to have at first nursed a plan to hold them in his own Paris alongside a world’s fair, but there were also voices fearing that if people waited a full six years their interest would cool, and so the helm was turned toward holding the Games in Athens two years later.

As the committee’s first head, the Greek-born man of letters Demetrios Vikelas was chosen. It was also a symbolic gesture, to hold the first Games in the land where they were born. Thus the vanished ancient festival made ready to rise again, clad in the garments of a new age. Yet between speaking of an ideal and actually gathering athletes from across the world to hold an event lay a great gulf.

To begin with, the very notion of an international sporting festival in which nations gathered every four years was almost without precedent in the modern world. It was precisely because railways and steamships had shortened the distance between nations, and newspapers had begun to carry distant events to the people, that the vision of the world’s youth assembling in one place took on a sense of reality. Coubertin’s ideal was supported not only by his own passion alone, but by the spirit of the modern age, in which people and information had begun to move across borders. Even so, the work of winning the assent of various nations to that vision, of preparing funds and a venue, and of gathering athletes from afar, demanded many times the effort of merely speaking of an ideal.

Amateurism, a proud constraint

At the heart of Coubertin’s ideal lay the idea of amateurism. Sport, he believed, should be something taken up not for money but by those who love it for its own sake — and he sought to keep those who competed for the sake of reward away from the modern festival. Just as the ancient victor received only a handful of olive crown, the modern Games, too, he held, must not be a place moved by money.

Incidentally, the phrase so often quoted when speaking of the Games — ‘the important thing is not to win but to take part’ — is frequently handed down as Coubertin’s own famous saying, yet there is another account of its origin. It is said to have begun as a passage from a sermon a certain clergyman gave to the athletes around the time of the 1908 London Games, and to have spread because Coubertin, deeply moved by it, quoted it. Whoever first spoke it, it is precisely because the phrase so well expresses the spirit of the modern Games that it has been handed down for so long. Such words, capturing an ideal in a single phrase, gave the enterprise of the Games a distinctive weight.

A handmade event, and a severe shortage of funds

And so, in 1896, the first modern Olympics opened in Athens. Around 14 nations took part, with some 240 athletes, it is said — a small festival not to be compared with the giant Games of today. Yet its preparation was far from smooth sailing. Greece at the time was in dire financial straits and, as a state, had little room to cover the cost of the event. The means to turn the ideal into reality were decisively lacking.

What rescued this crisis was the power of the private sector. Above all, the Greek-born businessman Georgios Averoff, who had built his fortune in Alexandria, Egypt, is said to have given an enormous donation for the rebuilding of the main stadium. With those funds, a magnificent stadium built entirely of marble rose again on the site of the ancient track, and a stage ready to receive tens of thousands of spectators was prepared. That a festival raising up an ideal was, in the end, held thanks to the wealth of a single magnate — this fact is symbolic when one considers the relationship between the Games and money.

In the closing stretch of the event, what was carved deepest into people’s memory was the long-distance race newly created in honor of an ancient tale: the marathon. When the local Greek runner Spyridon Louis, an unknown, came dashing into the stadium at the head of the field, the spectators were swept up in a frenzy, it is said. The modern Games, which had given its first cry amid the gap between ideal and lack of funds, thus left a sure emotion in people’s hearts. Yet as this festival went on, Games after Games, it would also come to be bound up with the prestige of nations and the designs of politics. Next time, we trace the age in which the Games changed its form into a festival of the state.