The 100 years of Olympism |
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First broadcast date
04/06/1996
Abstract
100 years ago, in Athens, opened the biggest sporting event in the world : the games of the first modern Olympiad.
It is a French aristocrat, Baron Pierre De Coubertin, who worked for the revival of the Olympic Games.
Production companies
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France 3 - Own production
Primary theme
Sport and games
Secondary themes
- Historical heritages / Antiquity
Credits / Cast
- Dorgans Alain - Journalist
Context
100 Years of Olympic Games
Stéphane Mourlane
The Olympic Games of the modern era have only a distant relationship with those of Ancient Greece. They do however reflect the 19th century ideals of the British aristocracy. Ideals which formed the bed-rock of a European elitist culture, spreading through the Empire across the world. Sport began to be taught to privileged youth in English private schools from the first half of the 19th century. It embodied their values, while at the same time they encouraged it in every sector of society. Baron Pierre de Courbertin, having spent some time in England, returned convinced of sport's beneficial effect on education, "to put colour back on the face". General Secretary of the Union des sociétés françaises de sports athlétiques, he first spoke about re-starting the Olympic Games in 1892, to spread pacificism and liberalism. Two year's later, at an international congress on amateur sport at the Sorbonne, he managed to get the idea broadly accepted. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was established to organise the games in a different place every four years. Amateurism was elevated to a cardinal value of the Olympic ideals, later laid down in a charter. The refusal to let athletes become professional was seen as a way of preserving the spirit of chivalry and the cult of effort, while also maintaining contact with the arts (for a long time the Games included cultural events). Although the people behind the revived Olympics believed the Games would create better understanding between people, helping the cause of pacificism, they also remained attached to patriotic values. The context of international tensions based on economic and military might, the rise of nationalism and territorial changes put this contradiction to the test.
From the very first Olympiade in Athens in 1896, internationalism took second place to nationalist passions. The victory of Spiridon Louys in the first marathon was considered symbolic of Greece renewing with its prestigious ancient past (the Olympic marathon was dreamed up by the French hellenist Michel Bréal, as a tribute to the exploit of a Greek soldier who, after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, ran all the way to Athens to announce the victory of their army over the Persians, before collapsing and dying). The instrumentalisation of the games for political and nationalist ends was only just begining, its high point being the 1936 Olympics in Berlin which Hitler wanted to make a shop window for the glory of the Nazi regime. The IOC has never managed to keep the Games separate from the vicissitudes of international relations: in the wake of the two world wars the conquered nations were excluded; the 1952 Games were an expression of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union; boycotts became a diplomatic form of arm twisting. The Olympics, with growing mediatisiation, were also used by conflicting groups to get their voice heard, either in a pacific way, like the black American sprinters making the clenched fist salute on the podium to denounce racial segregation in their country, or more violently and tragically, the terrorist attack by a Palestinian commando in 1972 which cost the lives of nine Israeli athletes in Munich.
The success of the Olympics, though, has never been questionned: the number of sports included keeps rising, from 43 in 1896 to 300 in 2012 for the summer Olympics (the winter Olympics began in 1924) as does the number of participants (more and more professionals, with women allowed in 1928): from 241 athletes representing 41 countries in 1896, to 2012 with the London Games receiving 200 delegations and 10,500 athletes. In 2008 during the Beijing Games, 4.5 billion spectators either watched or searched for information about the Games: De Courbertin's ideal of universality has been attained.
Bibliography :
Bermon Daniel, Pierre de Coubertin, Paris, Perrin, 2008, 429 p.
Clastres Patrick, Jeux olympiques. Un siècle de passion, Paris, Musée national du Sport et Les Quatre Chemins, 2008, 121 p.
Gafner Raymond (dir.) ; 1894-1994. Un siècle du Comité international olympique. L’idée, les présidents, l’œuvre, Lausanne, CIO, 1994, 3 vol.
Milza Pierre, Jequier François, Tétart Philippe (dir.), Le pouvoir des anneaux. Les Jeux olympiques à la lumière de la politique, Paris, Vuibert 2004, 352 p.
