Reviving the Games
In shaping the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin saw something indelibly attractive in the Ancient Games of Olympia, which took place from 776 B.C. through 261 A.D. But resurrecting the Panhellenic athletic festival of antiquity was also attractive to the Western powers during a time when French and German archaeological expeditions were unearthing the wonders of Olympia and Delphi.10 The Coubertin biographer John J. MacAloon writes that the Baron’s invocation of Europe’s shared Hellenic tradition was “the thinly spread but strong symbolic glue which held nascent international sport together” until Olympism could gain a foothold in the world’s imagination.11
In the late nineteenth century, the Baron worked tirelessly to chisel the Games from Greek history and revive them in fresh form, helped immensely by his station in the aristocracy.12 In 1895 the New York Times described Coubertin as “a man who comes from the best conservative stock of France, who is deeply interested in the moral regeneration of his country.”13 While the Baron could talk a good populist game, he was irrefutably a product of aristocratic wealth and values. His youth was filled with family stables, Parisian parks, and fencing lessons. His mother proselytized noblesse oblige.14 The young Baron was a man of banquets and letterheads, pomp and garnish. He had easy access to Europe’s aristocracy. To the end he signed his name with the title “Baron.”
Coubertin embodied fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism, with a dash of nobility and sporty panache. He penned a slew of writings on sport, education, and the revival of the Olympic Games. A peripatetic proselytizer, Coubertin crisscrossed Europe gathering allies and refining his talking points. He visited the United States more than once and, like a latter-day Tocqueville, marveled at the Americans’ pluck. Gathering support for his “Olympian Games,” he highlighted “the distinctly cosmopolitan character” of his enterprise and the idea that sport was “taking the place of unhealthy amusements and evil pleasures in the lives of young men.”15 He claimed “alcoholism has no more powerful antidote than athletics.”16 And he promised, “I shall burnish a flabby and cramped youth, its body and its character, by sport, its risks and even its excesses.”17 For Coubertin, sport was the vigorous key to redemption. “The muscles are made to do the work of a moral educator,” he wrote.18 The Olympics were a vehicle for producing an international band of the moral elite.
The Baron’s brand of macho manifesto matched up well with the worldview of US president Theodore Roosevelt. The two men struck up a friendship, marked by flurries of correspondence. In one letter, Roosevelt praised Coubertin’s jaunty approach to social uplift. “[I]n our modern, highly artificial, and on the whole congested, civilization,” he wrote, “no boon to the race could be greater than the acquisition by the average man of that bodily habit which you describe—a habit based upon having in youth possessed a thorough knowledge of such sports as those you outline, and then of keeping up a reasonable acquaintance with them in later years.”19 The Baron in turn viewed Roosevelt as a kindred spirit, “a firm partisan, an invaluable friend to our cause.”20 Upon Roosevelt’s death, Coubertin wrote a personal obituary in which he called the former president “a great man” and “devotee of athletics up to the end of his virile existence,” whose tombstone’s epitaph should share the motto of the Olympic Institute in Lausanne: “Mens fervida in corpore lacertoso” (“an ardent mind in a trained body”).21 The two men shared a deep affinity for “muscular Christianity” and an inclination to see the marriage of sport, machismo, patriotism, and democracy as a formula for strength.22
To capture the spirit infusing his project, Coubertin coined the term “Olympism.” For him this meant “an aristocracy, an elite,” although “an aristocracy whose origin is completely egalitarian,” since it is based on sporting prowess and work ethic.23 “Olympism,” he wrote, “is a state of mind that derives from a twofold doctrine: that of effort, and that of eurythmy.”24 Olympism, “the cult of effort,” and “the cult of eurythmy” formed a mystic triumvirate that reverberated through Coubertin’s writing.25 Again drawing from ancient Greece, he dubbed eurythmy a “divine harness,” a harmonious balance of athletics and art that was prevalent in ancient times but was now more important than ever in “our nervous age.” To him, eurythmy meant a world in “proper proportion,” with people living a “eurythmy of life” that blended bonhomie, bonheur, art, and Olympic aesthetics into a potent concoction of possibility.26
Theodore Roosevelt recognized the religious impulse in the Baron’s project: “I think that you preach just the right form of the gospel of physical development.”27 Like the Greeks, who threaded religion through the ancient Games, Coubertin saw Olympism as “a philosophico-religious doctrine,” a non-denominational festival of culture and sport designed to spur reverence and purity.28 Coubertin was prone to write about the Games as a “sacred enclosure” where athletes served a vital role. The Olympics were a “sanctuary reserved for the consecrated, purified athlete only, the athlete admitted to the main competitions and who became, in this way, a sort of priest, an officiating priest in the religion of the muscles.” For Coubertin, the modern Games were “a sort of moral Altis, a sacred Fortress where the competitors in the manly sports par excellence are gathered to pit their strength against each other.” The goal of all this was nothing less than “to defend man and to achieve self-mastery, to master danger, the elements, the animal, life.”29
A patina of religiosity shimmered through the Baron’s writings. “Sport to me was a religion, with church, dogmas, services and so on, but especially a religious feeling,” wrote Coubertin.30 To heighten that “feeling,” he doggedly installed layer upon layer of Olympic ceremony, elaborate spectacles designed to conjure the “athletic religious concept, the religio athletae.” In a 1935 speech he expanded on the idea: “The primary, fundamental characteristic of ancient Olympism, and of modern Olympism as well, is that it is a religion. By chiseling his body through exercise as a sculptor does a statue, the ancient athlete ‘honored the gods.’ In doing likewise, the modern athlete honors his country, his race, and his flag.”31 Coubertin and other true believers thought they could add religious fervor to flag-waving nationalism and unproblematically stir them into a potent brew of Olympism.
Internal Contradiction
Coubertin was renowned for his bounteous handlebar mustache—a hirsute gift that kept on giving. He was also famous for his belief that sport could scythe a path away from war and toward peace. “To celebrate the Olympic Games is to appeal to history,” Coubertin proclaimed. In turn, history “is the only genuine foundation for a genuine peace.”32 Yet the Baron’s views on the role of sport in matters of war and peace were in perpetual tension.
Coubertin was an eccentric Anglophile who saw in the sporting culture of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School the magic formula for Britain’s imperial dominance. While in his view the French were mired in physical inertia, softening up like idle dandies, Britons in the mold of Rugby School were mixing rigorous discipline with manly self-display. This led him to ponder “how well it would be for France were we to introduce into our school system some of that physical vitality, some of that animal spirit, from which our neighbors have derived such incontestable benefits.”33 The Baron came to believe that within the British schooling system and its athletic programs lay the means to reinvigorate the French nation after the humiliation of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. Sport, as he put it, was “a marvelous instrument for ‘virilization’.”34
France’s