INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

B. CONCLUSIONS ON “MODERN OLYMPIC GAMES”
Summary
History of the Modern Olympic Games
• Coubertin
The founder of the modern Olympic Games was Baron Pierre de
Coubertin (1863-1937), a son of a wealthy, conservative French
family. Despite his aristocratic origins, Coubertin was a latenineteenth-century
modern man with an interest reviving France—
which had been decimated after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War
in 1870. He believed that this could best be accomplished through
educational reform. He took the English school system as a model that
promoted democracy and social responsibility and incorporated sport
into the school curriculum.
Coubertin’s determination to achieve these goals through a revival
of a modern version of the ancient Olympic Games was motivated by
a number of ideological currents in the late-nineteenth century. His
Jesuit school experience, while not entirely positive, left Coubertin
with an interest in ancient Greece. Mentors, such as Père Henri Didon,
who believed in the cultivation of moral character through sport, and
Frédéric Le Play, a social reformer who promoted education and
social peace, were also influential. Coubertin also found inspiration in
English school system after reading Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s
School Days. This, plus the example of Thomas Arnold, headmaster at
Rugby School, convinced Coubertin that sport and physical activity
were important pedagogical tools.
There were a number of international intellectual currents that
influenced Coubertin to create a movement that went beyond
improving France. Utilitarianism was the mainstream philosophical
current among the bourgeoisie at this time. Influenced by thinkers
such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Coubertin could assert
that the modern nineteenth-century man should: “Look to the future,
speak frankly, act decisively.” Also popular was Darwinism, a
biological view of society within which sport could be seen as a tool
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