William Gladstone
PRETTY FANNY
A.J. Balfour was no athlete and his delicacy in manner and appearance earned him the name ‘Pretty Fanny’. His contribution to the world of sport was to substitute the name lawn tennis for the game previously known by the unpronounceable sphairistike. He also gave the language the expression ‘Bob’s your uncle’ since he owed his early political elevation to his uncle the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, whose name was Robert.
Following the Congress, Demetrious Vikelas became the first President of the IOC. This came as a surprise to Vikelas. He attended the Congress simply as a representative of the Pan-Hellenic Gymnastic Club and found himself voted into office because de Coubertin thought that the President of the IOC should be from the country that was to host the Olympics, as Athens duly did two years later. It was at this Congress, moreover, that de Coubertin persuaded his fellow Olympians that the games should be ‘ambulatory’, moving around the world between cities, rather than permanently based in Greece. Vikelas duly handed over to Pierre de Coubertin after two years, the second Games of the modern era being held in Paris, capital of de Coubertin’s native France though de Coubertin soon forgot his belief that the presidency should pass to a citizen of the host nation, keeping the office for himself for 29 years!
The first IOC had 15 members representing 11 countries (Britain, Italy and France each had two members), one of the countries represented being Bohemia and another the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only nine people have ever held the post of president. No Briton has ever been elected president but two Belgians have held the post, one of them being the current president, Jacques Rogge. Two hundred and five National Olympic Committees now comprise the Olympic movement, with over one hundred representatives sitting on the IOC itself whose members must speak in French or English. The IOC is based at Lausanne in Switzerland and its affairs are managed by an executive committee consisting of the president, four vice-presidents and ten other members who are elected by the full membership. The IOC makes a number of special awards including the ‘Pierre de Coubertin Medal’ for an athlete who has shown exceptional sportsmanship.
SALT LAKE CITY BID SCANDAL
The IOC has sometimes been involved in controversy. In December 1998 it was suggested that members of the IOC had accepted bribes to award the Winter Olympics of 2002 to Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Ten members of the IOC were expelled and another ten were sanctioned. In 2006 it was suggested that the Japanese city of Nagano had provided excessive hospitality to members of the IOC, the Winter Olympics having been held there in 1998. Similar allegations were levelled against Atlanta after 1996 but supporting documentation could not be found and the allegations were never substantiated.
The Olympic Charter
From two sentences to five chapters
The first Olympic Charter was adopted at the 1894 Congress, based on principles set out by William Penny Brookes at Much Wenlock. The 1894 Charter simply stated that: ‘The activity of the Olympic movement is permanent and universal. It reaches its peak with the bringing together of the athletes of the world at the great sport festival – the Olympic Games.’ The Charter has since become a much more elaborate and lengthy document with five chapters and sixty-one articles. It defines the mission of the Olympic Games; the role of the IOC and of other governing bodies of sports (for example, football, tennis and rugby) and their relationship with the IOC; the role of National Olympic Committees; and the processes by which the host cities will be chosen and the Olympic Games managed. The Charter specifies that all correspondence and debate must be conducted in English or French, an acknowledgement of the central role that both nations played in promoting the creation of the Modern Olympics. The Charter has often struggled to cope with such developments as doping and the conflict between amateurs and professionals.
Difficulties over definitions of amateurism arose from an early stage, and not just in the Olympic movement. William Penny Brookes at Much Wenlock was firmly committed to the amateur ethos, awarding prizes of nominal value as in the case of ‘The Old Women’s Race for a Pound of Tea’ and probably helped to instil this into de Coubertin though the Frenchman’s views were ambiguous. For example, in 1894, the year of the Congress, he publicly criticized the amateurism of English rowing at Henley and elsewhere, arguing that its exclusion of working-class athletes was wrong. While he believed that athletes should not be paid to be such, he did think that compensation should be paid to athletes who lost wages when they were competing (though not while they were training) and would otherwise have been earning money. Following the establishment of a definition for an amateur athlete at the 1894 Congress, he continued to argue that this definition should be amended as necessary and as late as 1909 argued that the Olympic movement should develop its definition of amateurism gradually. At an Olympic Congress in Prague in 1925, the last over which de Coubertin presided, it was agreed that athletes could be reimbursed for up to 15 days of expenses and a competitor had to declare ‘on my word of honour that I am an amateur in accordance with the Olympic rules on amateurism’. Anomalies remained. Schools’ sports instructors, deriving their income from sport, were allowed to compete while skiing instructors were banned, leading to a boycott of the Winter Olympics by Austria and Switzerland.
JULES RIMET
The anomalies that remained as a result of the Prague Agreement on amateurism were not enough to satisfy another Frenchman whose name is as honoured in sport as that of de Coubertin. Jules Rimet never played football (fencing was his preference) but he was convinced that the sport, already played on every continent, would bring people together. He believed that the amateur code of the Olympics unfairly penalized players of the working-class game and, as President of FIFA from 1921 to 1954, abandoned his attempts to incorporate football satisfactorily in the Olympics, pursuing instead the goal of a separate competition which became the first World Cup for the Jules Rimet Trophy in Uruguay in 1928. He thereby created an institution which is the chief rival