and his flag.”31 Coubertin and other true believers thought they could add religious fervor to flag-waving nationalism and unproblematically stir them into a potent brew of Olympism.
Internal Contradiction
Coubertin was renowned for his bounteous handlebar mustache—a hirsute gift that kept on giving. He was also famous for his belief that sport could scythe a path away from war and toward peace. “To celebrate the Olympic Games is to appeal to history,” Coubertin proclaimed. In turn, history “is the only genuine foundation for a genuine peace.”32 Yet the Baron’s views on the role of sport in matters of war and peace were in perpetual tension.
Coubertin was an eccentric Anglophile who saw in the sporting culture of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School the magic formula for Britain’s imperial dominance. While in his view the French were mired in physical inertia, softening up like idle dandies, Britons in the mold of Rugby School were mixing rigorous discipline with manly self-display. This led him to ponder “how well it would be for France were we to introduce into our school system some of that physical vitality, some of that animal spirit, from which our neighbors have derived such incontestable benefits.”33 The Baron came to believe that within the British schooling system and its athletic programs lay the means to reinvigorate the French nation after the humiliation of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. Sport, as he put it, was “a marvelous instrument for ‘virilization’.”34
France’s brutal defeat had an enormous impact on the young Coubertin. According to the Olympic scholar Jeffrey Segrave:
Coubertin became obsessed with the idea of creating a new French elite, a new brand of French Tories shaped by English sport and compatible with the Republic. This new elite was a sort of revamped French gentry federated by sports, which would allow France to once again assume leadership status among European nations and, indeed, the world at large in the commercial, military, and colonial realms.35
The Baron’s muscular nationalism worked in productive tension with his peace-loving internationalism. On one hand, sport was the supreme “peacemaker,” a cure that could help quell geopolitical tensions. He believed sport could bring people together to contemplate each other’s histories, create meaningful understanding, and surmount social and cultural barriers, making it “a potent, if indirect, factor in securing world peace.”36 Coubertin asserted that “manly sports are good for everyone and under all circumstances,”37 yet he recognized that there were limits to idealism. “To ask the peoples of the world to love one another,” he wrote, “is merely a form of childishness.”38 While athletic activity “will not make angels of brutes,” they could, he believed, “temper that brutality, giving the individual a bit of self-control.”39
But sometimes the Baron went the other direction. He argued that sport was “an indirect preparation for war,” and that the skill sets necessary for sport—“indifference towards one’s own well being, courage, readiness for the unforeseen”—translated seamlessly to warfare. “The young sportsman is certainly better prepared for war than his untrained brothers,” he asserted.40 A mere year before the outbreak of World War I, Coubertin, in a paroxysm of bellicose prescience, wrote, “People will learn a great lesson from the athlete: hatred without battle is not worthy of man, and insult without blows is utterly unbecoming.”41
The modern Olympics have always walked a tightrope between chauvinism and internationalism. When Orwell wrote that “international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred” he had the Olympics in mind. When it comes to international sports mega-events, he argued, “there cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism—that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”42 Coubertin aimed to undercut chauvinism by spreading the Olympic spirit, whereby “applause is vouchsafed solely in proportion to the worth of the feat accomplished, and regardless of any national preference … all exclusively national sentiments must then be suspended and, so to speak ‘sent on temporary holiday’.”43 While Orwell and his intellectual descendants would view this as hooey, Coubertin and his ilk embedded this idea in the high-minded Olympic Charter, the constitution of the Olympic movement. Still the tension between chauvinism and internationalism has persisted through all the Olympiads. It continues to trouble the Games today.
Another set of contradictions marks Coubertin’s life and work. While some Olympic historians argue he championed a “moderate political progressivism” based on inclusion and tolerance, many of his views on gender, race, and class were mired in the prejudices of the period.44 The Olympic Games were supposedly for everyone, but from the outset, numerous athletes were excluded.
Coubertin was a man of many talents, but penning feminist theory was not among them. “The Olympic Games must be reserved for men,” he frequently proclaimed. To the Baron, including women’s competitions was “impractical, uninteresting, ungainly, and, I do not hesitate to add, improper.”45 The very thought of it induced an “unseemly spectacle” in the mind.46 “Woman’s glory,” he said, “rightfully came through the number and quality of children she produced, and that where sports were concerned, her greatest accomplishment was to encourage her sons to excel rather than to seek records for herself.”47 He argued for “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism … with the applause of women as a reward.”48 When it came to the Olympics, the role of women “should be above all to crown the victors, as was the case in the ancient tournaments.”49
These opinions did not fade with time. Even in 1934—three years before he succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 74—the Baron declared, “I continue to think that association with women’s athleticism is bad…and that such athleticism should be excluded from the Olympic programme.”50 In 1935 Coubertin was still writing that the vaunted “young adult male” was “the person in whose honor the Olympic Games must be celebrated and their rhythm organized and maintained, because it is on him that the near future depends, as well as the harmonious passage from the past to the future.”51 Even after so many years and the slowly progressing climate of society at large, his views on women and sport had not evolved.
Some Olympic scholars attribute Coubertin’s unwavering insistence on the exclusion of women to “nineteenth century thinking,” and thus find it understandable.52 But there were many at the time who were pressing vigorously for women’s participation in the Games. If Coubertin’s views on women don’t make him a card-carrying troglodyte, at the least they are the mark of a man who lacked a moral compass set to true equality.
On matters of race, Coubertin was prone to a Eurocentric brand of racism only slightly relieved by a few liberal impulses. The Baron didn’t hesitate to differentiate between “savages” and the “civilized”; sport, he believed, was a prime vehicle to close the gap between the two. As he put it: “Sports means movement, and the influence of movement on bodies is something that has been evident from time immemorial. Strength and agility have been deeply appreciated among savage and civilized peoples alike. Both are achieved through exercise and practice: happy balance in the moral order.”53
Coubertin’s “moral order” made space for the notion that a “superior race” could enjoy “certain privileges,” and for the idea of “the natural indolence of the Oriental.”54 His views on the subject sound shocking today. “The theory proposing that all human races have equal rights leads to a line of policy which hinders any progress in the colonies,” he wrote; “the superior race is fully entitled to deny the lower race certain privileges of civilized life”—for their own good, of course.55
Nevertheless, Coubertin pressed for the admittance of African countries to the Olympic Games in his address to the twenty-second IOC
