perhaps it may appear premature to introduce the principal of sports competitions into a continent that is behind the times and among peoples still without elementary culture—and particularly presumptuous to expect this expansion to lead to a speeding up of the march of civilization in these countries. Let us think, however, for a moment, of what is troubling the African soul. Untapped forces—individual laziness and a sort of collective need for action—a thousand resentments, and a thousand jealousies of the white man and yet, at the same time, the wish to imitate him and thus share his privileges – the conflict between wishing to submit to discipline and to escape from it—and, in the midst of an innocent gentleness that is not without its charm, the sudden outburst of ancestral violence … these are just some features of these races to which the younger generation, which has in fact derived great benefit from sport, is turning its attention.56
The Baron proceeded to speculate that sport might help Africa “calm down,” since it “helps create order and clarify thought.” He concluded on an upbeat note: “Let us not hesitate therefore to help Africa join in” the Olympic Movement.57
Coubertin sometimes dogwhistled a dim awareness of the prejudices that others held, though certainly not himself. “Anglo-Saxons have some trouble in getting used to the idea that other nations can devote themselves to athleticism, and that successfully,” he wrote. “I can understand this, and the feeling is certainly excusable.” But he knew that the progressive possibilities of sport outweighed other considerations: “It does not follow that young men of other races, with blood and muscles like their own, should not be worthy of walking in their footsteps.”58
Many of the Baron’s views on race were socially acceptable in the mainstream of his time, but what really got him into trouble were his views on class and amateurism. The Olympic historian John Lucas once characterized the Baron as having an “ever-active mind” that “was grasshopper-like, never lingering for more than a few moments on any one subject.”59 But like it or not, Coubertin was forced to linger on the persistently spiky issue of amateurism.
Coubertin believed reserving the Olympics for amateur athletes was vital to the Games’ development. He wrote, “Convinced as I am that amateurism is one of the first conditions of the progress and prosperity of sport, I have never ceased to work for it.” He added, “When in 1894 I proposed to revive the Olympian Games, it was with the idea that they would also be reserved to amateurs alone.”60 His problems began when he imported the definition of amateurism that was rampant in class-bound nineteenth-century Britain. Those who performed manual labor for pay, whether tied to sports or not, were considered professionals and were thus sidelined from participation. This meant that if someone did not have an independent source of income outside of actual work—in other words, if they were not independently wealthy—they’d be excluded from the amateur category.61 Waged workers were out of luck. The Amateur Athletic Club in England took no chances, passing a rule known as “the mechanics clause,” which denied amateur status to anyone “who is by trade or employment, a mechanic, artisan, or labourer.”62 As Tony Collins notes in Sport in Capitalist Society, amateurism, as a crystalline reflection of British upper- and middle-class values, was deployed as “an ideology of control and exclusion, dressed up as moral imperative for sport.”63 The amateur code allowed the upper and middle classes to regulate working people behind a scrim of rhetorical morality.
The Baron was not keen to exclude people—at least not Anglo-Saxon males—from his Olympics. He preferred a fluffy, non-controversial definition of amateur athletics: “perfect disinterestedness” mixed with “the sentiment of honor.”64 But to get the five-ring engine revving, he had to compromise on the amateur issue, bending toward the British definition, at least in the early days of the Games. His reasoning became excruciatingly conciliatory, reaching such piano-wire tension that it threatened to snap altogether: “Our reaction must be based on adopting a more intelligent, broader, and certainly narrower, definition of an amateur,” he wrote in 1901, contradicting himself within a single sentence.65
Within a few years the strict British definition of amateurism had to give, in large part because of the pressure and popularity of professional soccer in England. 66 Working-class athletes from the United States also played a pivotal role. In advance of the 1908 Games in London, the New York Times pointed out the class bias of Olympic amateurism in discussing the “American oarsmen” who “have been discriminated against” by the Amateur Rowing Association of Great Britain’s definition of amateurism. “No artisan, laborer, or mechanic or man who does manual work for a living may compete,” the newspaper reported, constituting “a direct slap at American amateurs, most of whom are of the working class.”67
Writing in 1919, the Baron belatedly declared solidarity with that sentiment, maintaining that he’d wanted workers to be involved all along:
Formerly the practice of sport was the occasional pastime of rich and idle youth. I have labored for thirty years to make it the habitual pleasure of the lower middle classes. It is now necessary for this pleasure to enter the lives of the adolescent proletariat. It is necessary because this pleasure is the least costly, the most egalitarian, the most anti-alcoholic, and the most productive of contained and controlled energy. All forms of sport for everyone; that is no doubt a formula which is going to be criticised as madly utopian. I do not care.68
Coubertin argued that his Games needed to be opened up to the working class “if we do not want civilisation to blow up like a boiler without a valve.”69 Coubertin’s gestures toward working-class inclusion should not be confused with radical tendencies. Rather they were a mode of social control, a way to tamp down class conflict and to enforce the status quo. He was a staunch French Republican; to him, socialism was a scourge. “Let us not fall into the utopia of complete communism,” he once wrote.70 As the Olympic historian John Hoberman notes, Coubertin was able to “integrate conservative class interests into a modern ideology of sport” that has demonstrated extraordinary longevity.71
Coubertin was not dogmatic when it came to amateurism. He detested “false amateurs who reap fat rewards” for their athletic exploits,72 but he was also critical of the “rusty” definition of amateurism he inherited from the British, viewing it as “a means of social defense, of class preoccupation.”73 Coubertin wanted a definition of “amateur” that was fair and reasonable. But his push for a more nuanced definition was denied by the IOC Executive Committee in 1922 when it defined an amateur as “an athlete who does not gain any material benefit of his participation in competitions” and a professional as “an athlete who directly/indirectly gains benefit by his personal participation in sports.”74 As we shall see, future IOC presidents were continually forced to deal with the amateurism imbroglio. Avery Brundage, the IOC president from 1952 to 1972, was gripped with an almost religious fervor over the issue; professional athletes were the bane of his presidency. In contrast, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980 to 2001, the era of neoliberal capitalism, made professional athletes more than welcome.75
Coubertin was a pragmatist who formed strategic alliances to keep his beloved Games moving forward, even if it meant dancing with political devils (he praised both Mussolini and Hitler, host of the 1936 Berlin Games).76 But the Games always came first, and the Baron strove to imbue them with symbolic ritual, pomp, and pageantry. He added classical-style hymns, banners, and laurel leaves to the Olympic aesthetic. He created the iconic five-ring Olympic symbol in 1913, with the rings symbolic of the five continents and the colors of the rings representing hues found on flags around the world. Coubertin also designed the flag, with his five-ring icon in the center, first unveiling it at the 1914 Olympic World Congress in Paris to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the IOC. The flag made its Olympic premiere at the 1920 Antwerp Games, where it featured the now-familiar motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger).77 Coubertin moved the IOC headquarters from Paris to neutral
