download - IOA

Address
By Mr Nikos FILARETOS (GRE)
Member of the International Olympic Committee
President of the International Olympic Academy
Secretary General of the ICMG and
Vice Chairman of the Commission for Culture and Olympic Education of the IOC
Once again I welcome you, this time to our facilities in Olympia. You are
well aware that the sole purpose of the IOA is to promote Olympic Education
throughout the world and help the National Olympic Committees (NOC) to train
their senior staff. It is up to the NOCs to follow up on their contacts with you when
you return.
There are 178 of you, from 89 different countries from the five continents
here today. It is very comforting to know that 47% of you, some 85 participants,
are women. I am pleased to see that the efforts I have made over many years
have paid off.
You will soon realise that here, what is more important than our talks and
discussions are the real bonds of friendship that you will establish. You will
understand the value of mutual respect, of knowing one another better and
that, at the end of the day, we are all human beings with our faults and qualities.
Several years ago, one participant offered what for me is the best definition of,
and the best compliment to the IOA by comparing our Academy to the Olympic
Village in miniature, but without the anxiety of the following day's competition.
As I do every year here at Olympia, I cannot resist the temptation of once again
ending my speech with the words of Pierre de Coubertin: those he used when
addressing the youth of the world at Olympia on 17 April 1927 on the occasion of
the inauguration of the monument commemorating the re-establishment of the
Olympic Games:
"Thanks to the generosity of the Hellenic Government, the initiative it was
good enough to honour has now materialised into an event of historic importance.
It is for you now to keep the flag flying. My friends and I have not laboured to
restore the Olympic Games to you in order to make them a fitting object for a
museum or a cinema; nor is it our wish that mercantile or electoral interests
should seize upon them. Our object in reviving an institution twenty-five centuries
old was that you should become new adepts of the religion of sport, as our
great ancestors conceived it. In this modern world, so full of powerful possibilities,
and yet threatened by so many risks of degeneration, Olympism may be a school
of moral nobility and purity as well as of physical endurance and energy, but
38