The Ghost of Antiquity, Revived — Coubertin and the Modern Olympics

Some fifteen hundred years after the ancient Olympic Games fell silent, one man summoned the forgotten word ‘Olympic’ back into the modern world. Pierre de Coubertin. A French aristocrat and reformer of education, he borrowed the authority slumbering in the sacred precinct of ancient Greece and raised a grand ideal: world peace through sport. Yet the festival he revived, for all its ideal, was from the very first bound inseparably to politics.

The Man Who Called Back a Ghost

What was it that drove Coubertin? The story long told ran like this: a patriot, alarmed by France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and by the physical decline of its young men, revived the Games to regenerate the nation. But recent scholarship dismisses this account as too simple. Coubertin cannot be reduced to a narrow, nationalist reformer.

The real Coubertin held a far more international and educational ambition. Through the 1880s and into the 1890s he travelled again and again to Britain and the United States, studying with keen attention the physical education of the public schools and the universities — that same ‘sport as an education that shapes character’ seen in the previous episode. At the same time, the German excavation of ancient Olympia stirred in him a powerful longing for antiquity. British educational thought and the ancient glory of Greece: these two things crystallised, within him, into the conception of a modern Olympic Games.

In 1894, Coubertin gathered representatives of many nations at the Sorbonne in Paris. At this congress the International Olympic Committee was founded, and it was decided that two years later, in 1896, the first Games would be held in Athens, Greece. As its first president, in a gesture of respect toward the host country, the Greek man of letters Demetrios Vikelas was chosen.

A Religion of Peace by the Name of Sport

For Coubertin, the Olympics were no mere athletic meeting. They were an educational and spiritual project — one that would cultivate moral character and generate mutual understanding across borders. In a paper he contributed to an American magazine in 1896, he wrote as much: to gather young people of different races at regular intervals and let them measure their strength and skill in friendly contest — this, he held, could become a powerful means of overcoming the prejudices that divide peoples and of making world peace secure.

War breaks out because nations misunderstand one another. If, then, young people meet once every four years and compete under the same rules, that misunderstanding should dissolve. This was Coubertin’s conviction, and he spoke of it almost as a faith. Just as the ancient Games included offerings of art by poets and sculptors, he sought to weave art competitions into the modern Olympics as well — a grand ideal that bound sport, art, and peace into one.

The first Games at Athens proclaimed that ideal aloud. They opened on 6 April 1896, timed to Greek Independence Day. The restored Panathenaic Stadium was filled with fifty thousand spectators. Fourteen nations took part, and forty-five events were contested, from athletics to cycling, weightlifting, and tennis. And at these Games, for the first time, the marathon — its name drawn from an episode of ancient legend — was run through the streets of Athens.

Two Faces Hidden in a Festival of Peace

But here lies the fated contradiction of the modern Olympics: two opposing faces, internationalism and nationalism.

In Coubertin’s conception, the Games, like a world’s fair, would travel from host city to host city — an international stage on which peoples met and forged friendship. A platform binding nation to nation: that was the ideal face. In reality, however, the Games were from the first also an arena in which nations competed for prestige. Whose athletes would win? Which country would host? Of itself, this became a political stage on which national power was displayed to the world.

Indeed, from antiquity down to the modern age, the Olympics have never ceased to be a stage for political expression. Demonstrations, boycotts, embargoes — states and individuals alike have used the festival to exert their influence. The more loftily the ideal of a festival of peace is raised, the more the calculations of nations creep in. International cooperation and nationalism came to grapple, forever, within the single vessel of the Games.

Come to think of it, at the root of it all lies struggle. The hoplitodromos of the first episode; the ball games as proxy war of the second. Sport was, in its origin, a mechanism for discharging the conflict between groups within a safe frame. The modern Olympics did no more than wrap that energy of struggle anew in the beautiful word ‘peace.’ And that is precisely why, the moment the wrapping tears, conflict between nations shows its face once again.

Born as an ideal, the Olympics would, upon entering the twentieth century, lay those two faces bare. They would become a battlefield on which nations staked their prestige, and in time be swallowed by another vast power — broadcasting rights and sponsor money. The story continues on, into an age of war sublimated and of capital.