Pierre de Coubertin

Pierre de Coubertin: The Baron Who Rebuilt Olympia

He stood 1.62 metres tall and had no athletic ability worth mentioning. In November 1892, at a meeting of a French sports federation, he proposed reviving the Olympic Games of antiquity and the room did not understand what he was talking about. Eighteen months later he got his congress at the Sorbonne, and in 1896 the Games opened in Athens. He spent his own fortune on the project until there was very little left, and when he died in 1937 his heart was cut out and buried at Olympia, at Greece's request.

A Baron's Son in a Defeated France

Coubertin was born in Paris on 1 January 1863, the fourth child of Charles Louis de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, a royalist painter, and Marie-Marcelle Gigault de Crisenoy. The family traced its nobility to the fifteenth century and expected the boy to take up something suitable — the army, the church, politics.

He grew up instead through France's humiliation. The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune shaped his adolescence, and like a whole generation of French reformers he went looking for an explanation of why his country had collapsed so completely. He entered the Jesuit Externat de la rue de Vienne in October 1874, where he did very well, and later took a degree in law and public affairs at what is now Sciences Po. Then he abandoned the careers that education implied and gave his life to a single obsession: physical education.

What He Found at Rugby School

In 1883 he crossed the Channel to see Rugby School and study the athletic regime associated with Thomas Arnold. He had read *Tom Brown's School Days* and taken it, more or less, as documentary evidence. What he thought he saw in the English public school was a machine for manufacturing character: boys made resilient, disciplined and cooperative by organised games, and a nation made strong by those boys. France, he concluded, had lost in 1870 because it had educated the mind and neglected the body.

The rest of his career is the working-out of that diagnosis. In 1888 he founded the Comité Jules Simon to push physical exercise into French schooling. Around 1889 the larger idea arrived: not a national programme but an international one — the Games of Olympia, revived.

The Sorbonne, 1894

The 1892 proposal fell flat. Coubertin regrouped and did what he was actually brilliant at, which was organising people. He convened an international congress at the Sorbonne, and on 23 June 1894 it created the International Olympic Committee and named Athens as host of the first modern Games in 1896. Diplomatically, he handed the founding presidency to the Greek Demetrios Vikelas — a gesture that bound Greece to the project — and took the chair himself once the Athens Games were over.

He then held the presidency for nearly three decades, from 1896 to 1925, and those decades were mostly a grind. The 1900 Paris and 1904 St Louis Games were swallowed by the World's Fairs they were attached to, reduced to sideshows spread over months. The 1906 intercalated Games in Athens rescued the movement's credibility. He kept going through a world war and stepped down only after the triumphant Paris Games of 1924, handing over to Henri de Baillet-Latour.

Inventing the Furniture of the Games

Almost everything the modern Olympics uses to identify itself came from him or through him. He proposed the motto *Citius, Altius, Fortius* — Faster, Higher, Stronger — in 1894, borrowing the phrase from his friend Henri Didon. He designed the five interlocking rings in 1913. He created the modern pentathlon for the 1912 Games. He pushed for years, against resistance, to have art competitions included alongside athletic ones, and eventually won.

He also, in 1912, entered the literature competition himself under the pseudonym "Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach" with a poem called "Ode to Sport," and won the gold medal. The poem calls sport the delight of the gods and a consolation for the grey dinginess of modern existence. It is not good poetry. It is a perfect illustration of the man: sincere, grandiose, and quietly arranging things behind the scenes.

His personal life was harder than his public one. He married Marie Rothan in 1895; their son Jacques and daughter Renée both suffered severe and lasting difficulties. He founded the interfaith scouting organisation Éclaireurs Français in 1911. And he poured his inherited money into the IOC until he had very little, spending his last years in genuine financial trouble.

Why Pierre de Coubertin Is Called a Genius

The claim is not that he was a great thinker; his written philosophy is thin, and "Olympism is not a system, it is a state of mind" is the kind of line that survives because it cannot be checked. The claim is that he was a genius of institutional design. He saw, decades before anyone else, that a recurring, rotating, ritualised international festival could do something no treaty or league could: give nations a stage on which to compete without killing each other, and make hundreds of millions of people care. Then — and this is the rarer gift — he actually built the machine. The IOC, a self-perpetuating private body answerable to no government, was a strange and audacious constitutional invention, and it is the reason the Games survived two world wars, the Cold War, boycotts and scandal when almost every other internationalist project of the 1890s is forgotten. The rings, the motto, the four-year rhythm, the ceremony: he understood that an institution needs symbols before it needs rules, and he supplied them.

The counter-case is heavy and must not be soft-pedalled. Coubertin opposed women's participation in Olympic competition for his entire life, dismissing female athleticism in print as impractical, uninteresting and unaesthetic — a position that was contested in his own time and that he never revised, even as women's numbers rose during his presidency. His account of antiquity was fiction: historians, David C. Young among them, have shown that the ancient athletes he held up as pure amateurs were in fact professionals, so the amateurism he enforced for decades — with real consequences for working-class competitors — rested on a myth he preferred to the evidence. His claim that sport promotes peace and international understanding runs well ahead of the historical record. He praised sport for crossing class lines while presiding over a movement that did no such thing. And in retirement he helped Berlin secure the 1936 Games and accepted a Nobel Peace Prize nomination from Nazi Germany, in the year the prize went to the imprisoned anti-Nazi Carl von Ossietzky. He was an organisational genius with reactionary instincts, and the institution he built has spent ninety years correcting him.

Legacy

Coubertin died of a heart attack in Geneva on 2 September 1937. His body lies in Lausanne; his heart, by his own wish, is sealed in a stele at Olympia, and the Olympic flame passes through his grove before it begins its journey. Every four years — now every two — the thing he assembled out of nostalgia, bad history and formidable administrative skill reconvenes, larger than he imagined and almost entirely unlike what he intended.

Achievements

• Knight Officer of the Order of the Polar Star
• Commander of the Order of St. Olav‎
• Grand Cross of the Order of the Phoenix
• Commander First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland
• Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau
• 2nd Class Order of the Crown
• Competed at 1912 Summer Olympics and art competitions at the 1912 Summer Olympics
• Discipline: rugby union