The “New” Olympics

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was born in 1863, a member of a famous French family. At the age of twenty he went to England to study the British educational system and wrote a thesis for his Baccalaureate on Dr. Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby. He was particularly impressed by the important role of athletics in English education. French education at that time was too exclusively intellectual. In his writings on education de Coubertin advocated a harmony between mind and muscle. He himself was no scholar, and there is nothing in his references to the classic Olympic games which could not have been lifted direct from an encyclopedia.

The first of the revived Olympics was held in Athens in 1896. The Turks were still in possession of large areas of Graecia Irridenta, and the Games by reminding Greeks of “the glory that was Greece” rendered this continued partition of Greece still more intolerable. The monks of Athos, still subject to the rule of Turkey, sent offerings towards the expenses of the Games, and just as the Greeks from the colonies met the Greeks of the motherland at Olympia, and seized the opportunity to discuss the common problems of the Hellenic world, so in the Athens of 1896 the Greeks who won their freedom met Greeks who had still to expel the Turk. It was freely asserted that the rekindling of Greek patriotism during the Games at Athens was a contributory cause of the Graeco-Turkish war.

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Sir Arnold Lunn

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Baron Pierre de Coubertin was born in 1863, a member of a famous French family. At the age of twenty he went to England to study the British educational system and wrote a thesis for his Baccalaureate on Dr. Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby. He was particularly impressed by the important role of athletics in English education. French education at that time was too exclusively intellectual. In his writings on education de Coubertin advocated a harmony between mind and muscle. He himself was no scholar, and there is nothing in his references to the classic Olympic games which could not have been lifted direct from an encyclopedia.

The first of the revived Olympics was held in Athens in 1896. The Turks were still in possession of large areas of Graecia Irridenta, and the Games by reminding Greeks of “the glory that was Greece” rendered this continued partition of Greece still more intolerable. The monks of Athos, still subject to the rule of Turkey, sent offerings towards the expenses of the Games, and just as the Greeks from the colonies met the Greeks of the motherland at Olympia, and seized the opportunity to discuss the common problems of the Hellenic world, so in the Athens of 1896 the Greeks who won their freedom met Greeks who had still to expel the Turk. It was freely asserted that the rekindling of Greek patriotism during the Games at Athens was a contributory cause of the Graeco-Turkish war.