Forgetting Pierre de Coubertin | Paris 2024 Olympic Games

Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) was a sexist, papist, xenophobe, racist, colonialist, misogynist, monarchist baron of republican France, friend of Adolf Hitler and classist. He did not invent the modern Olympic Games, but he was the first president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), he coined the term “Olympism” as early as 1901, five years after the first Games in Athens, and he theorized the foundations on which the Olympic movement still rests: the autonomy of sport from political and commercial interference and the principle of cooperation among IOC members among the most …

Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) was a sexist, papist, xenophobe, racist, colonialist, misogynist, monarchist baron of republican France, friend of Adolf Hitler and classist. He did not invent the modern Olympic Games, but he was the first president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), he coined the term “Olympism” already in 1901, five years after the first Games in Athens, and he theorized the foundations on which the Olympic movement still rests: the autonomy of sport from political and commercial interference and the principle of cooperation between IOC members and the highest social spheres and economic elites of all countries, which allows it to be built as a sovereign organization to which states bow and submit. sports federations.

His figure was key, making lobbying between the great powers, for the resumption of the Games after the Great War in Antwerp in 1920, when there was growing disillusionment with the pacifist ideal of the mythical Olympic truce, and the consideration of the Games as an unarmed confrontation between the best of all the youth of the world. Despite this, despite the fact that even before the Great War and all the Olympic ceremonies and rituals, he invented the Olympic flag with five rings, and despite the fact that he was born in Paris into a noble family, during the Commune, neither the capital of the Seine on the occasion of the third Olympic Games, which he hosts, nor the IOC, which celebrates its 142nd session here under the presidency of Thomas Bach, offer in his honor more than disdain, doubt and oblivion.

Last February, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, turned a deaf ear to a request to bury the Baron’s remains in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men in Paris, a ceremony that would have marked his civil canonization just in time for the return of the Games to the capital, 100 years after the last time. The request, politely supported by Bach, had come two years earlier from the academic and Goncourt Prize laureate Eric Orsenna and from Guy Drut, the Minister of Sports under President Jacques Chirac, an Olympic champion in the 110-meter hurdles in Montreal ’76 and an IOC member. Drut received no official reason for the refusal, although reasons were given at the time for the fact that even the Olympic Baron’s own family had not asked him pantheonization and that the body, by his own choice, is buried in the Bois de Vaux cemetery in Lausanne (Switzerland), where he moved from Paris in 1915, an insult to the IOC headquarters and his residence, and his heart to Olympia, Greece, enclosed in a white marble column erected in his honor, a monument he himself unveiled in 1927, 10 years before his death.

News reports from the time also recalled Coubertin’s relationship with Nazi Germany, his support for the 1936 Berlin Games, and his acceptance of Hitler’s never-heard offer of a Nobel Peace Prize. And they brought to light some of his writings defending colonialism and the ethnic superiority of some races over others: “Without reducing them, of course, to slavery, or even to a mild form of slavery, the superior race is perfectly justified in ‘denying to the inferior certain privileges of civilized life.’”

It was at the Paris Games that the IOC proclaimed equality in participation between men and women, 50% of each sex, news that would surely have made Coubertin, the man who had argued in numerous articles that women’s only role at certain Games should be to hand over medals to the champions, vomit. “The role of women in the world should be what it has always been; ‘she is man’s companion, the future mother of the family,’ he wrote, before declaring that the Games should be reserved for men and that women’s participation would be ‘impractical, uninteresting and unattractive’. The use of the term ‘Olympic’ by Alice Milliat, a pioneer in organising women’s sports, when the so-called first women’s Olympic Games were held at the Pershing Stadium in Vincennes, Paris, in August 1922, deeply disturbed her. ‘At the Olympic Games, your role should be primarily to reward the winners,’ he repeated. At the 1924 Paris Games, his last as IOC president, 135 women and 3,089 men competed in golf, swimming, horse riding and tennis. They were not allowed into track and field until October 28 in Amsterdam.

As if the memory of who founded Olympism troubled the 21st century.

But Coubertin had already suffered a cruel treatment in his last years as IOC president, in the period between the wars and the great social and cultural mobilization. He was then a sixty-year-old man and seemed to be out of touch with his times. At a time when France and Germany were arguing over the payment of reparations for the First World War, he was trying hard to get Germany to participate in the second Paris Games, 24 years after the first. In his biography, Daniel Bermond writes: “A black legend grew up around Coubertin. He did everything he could to perpetuate it.” “This otherwise enlightened mind quickly embraced the strongest prejudices of his time and reflected all the ambiguities of the society in which he lived,” he adds. Coubertin barely survived, but he did not disappear completely from the Olympic movement. He was named President for Life of the Olympic Games, despite the fact that his candidate for the throne, his compatriot Godefroy de Blonay, was defeated in the election by the Belgian Henri de Baillet-Latour, and he had to fight to stop him, considering him an authoritarian dead ancestor.”

In Paris there is no heart, no grave, but there is a memorial plaque with the Olympic rings engraved under the number 20. Street Oudinot, 7th arrondissement, metro San Francisco Xavier, half an hour’s walk from the Sorbonne. “Pierre de Coubertin, educator, historian, humanist, restorer of the Olympic Games and founder of the IOC, was born and lived here, where in 1894 he founded the first permanent headquarters of the International Olympic Committee.” After Paris 1924, Coubertin never attended the Games again.

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