drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled.” For the Baron, sport was Beauty, Audacity, Honor, Joy, Fecundity, Progress, and Peace—in short, pretty much everything, a divine nectar of righteousness, rectitude, and benevolent possibility: “O Sport, you are Beauty!” he gushed. “O Sport, you are Justice! The perfect equity for which men strive in vain in their social institutions is your constant companion.”
Coubertin concluded his panegyric with sweeping optimism, ascribing to the object of his adoration the ability to heal the wounds of war—even prevent it outright: “You promote happy relations between peoples, bringing them together in their shared devotion to a strength which is controlled, organized, and self-disciplined. From you, the young world-wide learn self-respect, and thus the diversity of national qualities becomes the source of a generous and friendly rivalry.”4 For Coubertin, sport was brimming with use value.
The Baron had previously used the pseudonym Georges Hohrod, both for a novella he published in 1899 and for a 1902 collection titled Le Roman d’un Rallié; scholars have therefore speculated that the literary judges in Stockholm knew precisely whom they were picking to win the prize.5 But those questions aside, the poem distills the idealism stoking Coubertin’s passion for the Olympics, as well as the contradictions inherent in that idealism.
Coubertin had wanted the Muse’s Pentathlon in the competitive mix from the time he founded the Olympic Games in 1896—or the “Olympian Games,” as they were more often called in the early days—but he would have to wait several years until it made its way in.6 Once the Muse’s Pentathlon was installed on the official list of Olympic events at Stockholm, the arts held a firm place on the agenda through 1948.7 Thereafter arts contests fizzled due to lack of spectator interest; the fans preferred competitive sports.8 Curiously, in his voluminous posthumous writings, Coubertin never alluded to his gold-medal-winning poem.9 But the Baron had weightier matters on his mind: how to keep his beloved Olympic creation afloat in a sea of skepticism and indifference.
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
