Coubertin believed reserving the Olympics for amateur athletes was vital to the Games’ development. He wrote, “Convinced as I am that amateurism is one of the first conditions of the progress and prosperity of sport, I have never ceased to work for it.” He added, “When in 1894 I proposed to revive the Olympian Games, it was with the idea that they would also be reserved to amateurs alone.”60 His problems began when he imported the definition of amateurism that was rampant in class-bound nineteenth-century Britain. Those who performed manual labor for pay, whether tied to sports or not, were considered professionals and were thus sidelined from participation. This meant that if someone did not have an independent source of income outside of actual work—in other words, if they were not independently wealthy—they’d be excluded from the amateur category.61 Waged workers were out of luck. The Amateur Athletic Club in England took no chances, passing a rule known as “the mechanics clause,” which denied amateur status to anyone “who is by trade or employment, a mechanic, artisan, or labourer.”62 As Tony Collins notes in Sport in Capitalist Society, amateurism, as a crystalline reflection of British upper- and middle-class values, was deployed as “an ideology of control and exclusion, dressed up as moral imperative for sport.”63 The amateur code allowed the upper and middle classes to regulate working people behind a scrim of rhetorical morality.
The Baron was not keen to exclude people—at least not Anglo-Saxon males—from his Olympics. He preferred a fluffy, non-controversial definition of amateur athletics: “perfect disinterestedness” mixed with “the sentiment of honor.”64 But to get the five-ring engine revving, he had to compromise on the amateur issue, bending toward the British definition, at least in the early days of the Games. His reasoning became excruciatingly conciliatory, reaching such piano-wire tension that it threatened to snap altogether: “Our reaction must be based on adopting a more intelligent, broader, and certainly narrower, definition of an amateur,” he wrote in 1901, contradicting himself within a single sentence.65
Within a few years the strict British definition of amateurism had to give, in large part because of the pressure and popularity of professional soccer in England. 66 Working-class athletes from the United States also played a pivotal role. In advance of the 1908 Games in London, the New York Times pointed out the class bias of Olympic amateurism in discussing the “American oarsmen” who “have been discriminated against” by the Amateur Rowing Association of Great Britain’s definition of amateurism. “No artisan, laborer, or mechanic or man who does manual work for a living may compete,” the newspaper reported, constituting “a direct slap at American amateurs, most of whom are of the working class.”67
Writing in 1919, the Baron belatedly declared solidarity with that sentiment, maintaining that he’d wanted workers to be involved all along:
Formerly the practice of sport was the occasional pastime of rich and idle youth. I have labored for thirty years to make it the habitual pleasure of the lower middle classes. It is now necessary for this pleasure to enter the lives of the adolescent proletariat. It is necessary because this pleasure is the least costly, the most egalitarian, the most anti-alcoholic, and the most productive of contained and controlled energy. All forms of sport for everyone; that is no doubt a formula which is going to be criticised as madly utopian. I do not care.68
Coubertin argued that his Games needed to be opened up to the working class “if we do not want civilisation to blow up like a boiler without a valve.”69 Coubertin’s gestures toward working-class inclusion should not be confused with radical tendencies. Rather they were a mode of social control, a way to tamp down class conflict and to enforce the status quo. He was a staunch French Republican; to him, socialism was a scourge. “Let us not fall into the utopia of complete communism,” he once wrote.70 As the Olympic historian John Hoberman notes, Coubertin was able to “integrate conservative class interests into a modern ideology of sport” that has demonstrated extraordinary longevity.71
Coubertin was not dogmatic when it came to amateurism. He detested “false amateurs who reap fat rewards” for their athletic exploits,72 but he was also critical of the “rusty” definition of amateurism he inherited from the British, viewing it as “a means of social defense, of class preoccupation.”73 Coubertin wanted a definition of “amateur” that was fair and reasonable. But his push for a more nuanced definition was denied by the IOC Executive Committee in 1922 when it defined an amateur as “an athlete who does not gain any material benefit of his participation in competitions” and a professional as “an athlete who directly/indirectly gains benefit by his personal participation in sports.”74 As we shall see, future IOC presidents were continually forced to deal with the amateurism imbroglio. Avery Brundage, the IOC president from 1952 to 1972, was gripped with an almost religious fervor over the issue; professional athletes were the bane of his presidency. In contrast, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980 to 2001, the era of neoliberal capitalism, made professional athletes more than welcome.75
Coubertin was a pragmatist who formed strategic alliances to keep his beloved Games moving forward, even if it meant dancing with political devils (he praised both Mussolini and Hitler, host of the 1936 Berlin Games).76 But the Games always came first, and the Baron strove to imbue them with symbolic ritual, pomp, and pageantry. He added classical-style hymns, banners, and laurel leaves to the Olympic aesthetic. He created the iconic five-ring Olympic symbol in 1913, with the rings symbolic of the five continents and the colors of the rings representing hues found on flags around the world. Coubertin also designed the flag, with his five-ring icon in the center, first unveiling it at the 1914 Olympic World Congress in Paris to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the IOC. The flag made its Olympic premiere at the 1920 Antwerp Games, where it featured the now-familiar motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger).77 Coubertin moved the IOC headquarters from Paris to neutral territory—Lausanne, Switzerland—in 1915, where it remains today.78 And he chose effective teammates like Demetrios Vikelas, the affable Greek who eventually became the first president of the IOC. Thanks to the Baron’s energy, stamina, talent, and panache, the Games were on.
Party Like It’s 1896
In 1894, Coubertin gathered a throng of sports aficionados for an international congress in Paris to discuss the vexing question of amateurism in athletics. In his initial appeal, he did not explicitly mention his plan to revive the Olympic Games, for fear of alienating potential participants.79 But by the time he issued a preliminary agenda, he tacked on as the eighth and final item “the possibility of restoring the Olympic Games … under what circumstances could they be restored?”80 By the time the actual congress rolled around, this single bullet point was expanded into three agenda items pertaining to the Games’ “advantages from the athletic, moral and international points of view,” the selection of specific sports for inclusion at the Games, and the “nomination of an International Committee responsible for preparing their re-establishment.”81
Some 2,000 witnesses to the proceedings packed the Sorbonne’s amphitheater, including seventy-nine official delegates from forty-nine athletic societies based in twelve countries. Luminaries in attendance included representatives of the Paris Polo Club, the French Equestrian Society, and the Society for the Encouragement of Fencing. Numerous royals accepted the invitation: the king of Belgium, the prince of Wales, Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, Sweden’s royal prince, the crown prince of Greece, and more.82 Early on, the congress was divided into two committees, one that would examine amateurism, and the other, Olympism.83 Journalists from prominent newspapers—Le Figaro, The Times of London, the New York Times, the National-Zeitung—were on hand to cover the action.84 The stage was set.
The Baron wasn’t about to squander the opportunity. He packed the inner circle with dignitaries sympathetic to his Olympic dream. He handpicked an “International Committee for the Olympic Games”—the first iteration of the IOC—that was swiftly ratified by the congress. From the beginning, the IOC carried the whiff of aristocracy, featuring