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Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce,


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Pierre de Coubertin's vision of the role


of sport in peaceful internationalism
a
Irena Martínková
a
Faculty of Physical Education and Sport, Charles University in
Prague, Czech Republic

Version of record first published: 20 Jul 2012

To cite this article: Irena Martínková (2012): Pierre de Coubertin's vision of the role of
sport in peaceful internationalism, Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics,
DOI:10.1080/17430437.2012.708281

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Sport in Society
iFirst article, 2012, 1–10

Pierre de Coubertin’s vision of the role of sport in peaceful


internationalism
Irena Martı́nková*

Faculty of Physical Education and Sport, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

This paper presents the topic of peacemaking in relation to the practice of sport within
Olympism. It is based on the thinking of Pierre de Coubertin and his understanding
of Olympism. First, it discusses the practice of sport in relation to two kinds of
competition – excessive and moderate. Second, it identifies six key themes in the work
of de Coubertin that help to promote moderate competition and that enable sport
practice to be peace promoting. These are equality, amateurism, the importance of
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process and discipline, the role of knowledge of self and others and respect for others.
An understanding of these themes can help to make the practice of sport more
peaceful – and truly Olympic.

Introduction
There are different ways of achieving an aim. If we set ourselves to follow the aim of
promoting peace, we can try to fulfil it in different ways. In this paper, I shall present one
way that could nurture peace, which is Olympism. The basis of Olympism is active
participation in competitive sport. The father of modern Olympism, Pierre de Coubertin,
set the value of peace as one among the humanistic, social, moral and religious values with
which he endowed Olympism. In his gradual effort to refine Olympism as it developed
during the final years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century,
de Coubertin gave these values consideration in different speeches he delivered and
articles he wrote. The main topic of this paper is to consider those of his ideas that are
devoted to the value of peace and the way of achieving it.
The importance of the idea of peace can be seen, for example, in its inclusion in de
Coubertin’s anonymous medal-winning ‘Ode to Sport’:
O Sport, you are Peace!
You forge happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in reverence for
strength which is controlled, organized and self-disciplined. Through you the young of all the
world learn to respect one another, and thus the diversity of national traits becomes a source of
generous and peaceful emulation.1
Presently, the idea of peace is still firmly embedded within the Olympic movement and is
presented as one of its main goals, as formulated in the Olympic Charter: ‘The goal of
Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a
view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity’.2
The topic that is most often connected to talking about peace within Olympism is
truce.3 This means a period of cessation of hostilities during the time of the Olympic

*Email: martinkova@ftvs.cuni.cz

ISSN 1743-0437 print/ISSN 1743-0445 online


q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2012.708281
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2 I. Martı́nková

Games. Though this time is only of a limited period, it gives an opportunity for living in
peace at least for the time of the Olympic Games. Presently, Olympic Truce is officially
endorsed by the United Nations although, unfortunately, it is not always respected.
Though this is an important idea, it does not exhaust the opportunities of Olympism to
contribute towards peacemaking. In this article, I shall not discuss peace as truce,
but rather I shall take a look at other ideas of de Coubertin that are connected to this topic
with respect to Olympism.
De Coubertin’s path towards the aim of peace is a quite specific one, since the basis of
Olympism is competitive sport, and the connection of competitive sport to peace is not at
all clear at first sight. As such, it needs a proper explanation. In the following sections,
I shall examine de Coubertin’s understanding of Olympism as a means of peacemaking,
and I shall show different aspects of this. First, I shall present the problem of competition
with respect to peace, and then I shall identify six important themes in the work of de
Coubertin and explain how they contribute to his ideas on peacemaking.
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The problem of the connection of competitive sport to the value of peace


Competitive sport is inextricable from Olympism and its values. It forms the major means
of Olympic education and its aim of the overall improvement of the human being. It is
interrelated with the conviction of Pierre de Coubertin that engagement in competitive
sport can introduce harmony into our lives and, with that, into the nations and the whole
world.4 Within Olympism, competitive sport is thus necessarily related to Olympic values,
which include excellence, joyful striving, harmonious development of the human being
with respect to the self as well as others and, last but not least, peace.
It is the connection of peace and the means to reach it – competitive sport – that must
be discussed in some detail. At first glance, it looks as though athletes in competition are
not much at peace with each other, but rather at war – fighting against each other. What we
see in sport is a struggle and a determined striving to overcome one’s opponent. At first
glance it seems an athlete fighting against another athlete, a team fighting against another
team and a nation fighting against another nation. And since it is only one athlete or one
team of the overall participants who can win (apart from some cases of competition that
allow a tie), we cannot easily assume that this striving will issue in a peaceful outcome.
Participation in sport does not have to have a harmonious motivation either: sport may be
used as a means for revenge, for demonstrating one’s strength, for showing one’s
alleged superiority and so on. Participation in competitive sport thus may entail various
problems due to the character of competition with regard to the ambition of peacemaking.
Even though de Coubertin was very much aware of these problems, he nevertheless
insisted on advocating competition as a necessary means within Olympism:
[ . . . ] can we dispense with all forms of competition? In general, should we hope that human
beings will one day be so sensible, so careful of their self-interest, health, proper mental
balance and physical condition that they will have no further need for a competitive spirit? No,
not at all! That would be a utopia!5
The need for competition, according to de Coubertin, originates from the necessity
to attract young people to get engaged in sports and to motivate them in this way to
educate themselves. Also, according to de Coubertin, in competing the human being is
able to achieve more than when practising sport just for fun. And this is what indeed
happened – sport competition has become very attractive for youth, and it has attracted
youth to take part in sports ever since the renewal of Olympism. Nevertheless, to
understand competition as a motivation does not necessarily mean that we have to treat it
Sport in Society 3

uncritically during sport participation. This becomes clear especially when we realize that
Olympic competition is not just any kind of competition – since Olympism is endowed
with various values, as said above, it needs to respect much more than just the value of
winning and overcoming the opponent, to which pure competition may lead (and indeed,
it often does).
De Coubertin himself distinguished between two kinds of competition that we can
refer to as to ‘excessive competition’ and ‘moderate competition’. By excessive or
vulgar competition, de Coubertin means intense, unbridled competition that is aimed at
material gain, self-promotion and competition at all costs. This kind of competition
‘gives occasions of blameworthy acts to the commission, engenders a lamentable
atmosphere of jealousy, envy, vanity and mistrust’.6 On the other hand, moderate
competition requires the regulation of excess. The aim of moderate competition is not
based on material gain and self-promotion, but rather on self-development and worthwhile
experiences. The aim is ‘the cult of athletics practised in the purest spirit of true sport,
proudly, joyfully and loyally’.7 But de Coubertin understood that this kind of aim is not
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generally very attractive for sport participants.8 Thus, for the promotion of the moderate
kind of competition, it is important to let athletes develop within such circumstances as
would indirectly lead to these outcomes. This is related to Olympic education and the
development of understanding related to sport practice, while being set in the context of
desirable values. This understanding, in relation to peacemaking, will be discussed in the
following sections of this paper.
So now, if we wish to be in harmony with Olympism, we have to be careful about the
kind of competition in which we engage. While it seems that human beings generally tend
to follow excessive competition, it is rather the moderate kind of competition that needs to
be nurtured if we wish to be Olympic athletes. This may sound strange, since in practice it
may look as though it should be the other way round, but present practice is quite far from
de Coubertin’s ideas. Let us take a closer look at both of these kinds of competition.
The excessive kind of competition may have unpleasant consequences in terms of
human conduct that can be considered as rather contradictory to what Olympism is trying
to achieve. Unbridled striving for winning, which is inextricable from defeat, may easily
lead to sadness and frustrations of those who have not won, to cheating of various kinds
(including violence and doping), animosity towards opponents and failure to respect them
and so on.9 Since engagement in competition has the capacity (one might say threat) to
bring about qualities that are opposite to those of Olympic values, and since in any case it
is not an easy or straightforward matter to achieve the Olympic values, the promotion of a
positive – moderate – kind of competition is required. This does not mean mere
participation in sport competition, but it requires some extra effort from us. Since human
beings usually do not tend to understand competition as moderate, there is a need for
education. No wonder de Coubertin had to devote quite a lot of time to thinking and
writing about the topic of education, when he became more and more aware of this
problem. And in line with his realization of the centrality of this problem, which
accompanied the gradual development of Olympism, de Coubertin started to devote his
thought more and more to the theme of Olympic education.
Now, the basic question is how can we keep youth involved in the right kind of
competition that would lead to promoting Olympic values? This question must not be
answered only by scholars – although this might be a start – but most importantly must
be understood and answered by parents and coaches and, last but not least, athletes
themselves. Moderation within competition can be achieved by imposing certain
limitations upon it and a certain modification of the sport environment as well as an
4 I. Martı́nková

understanding of what competition actually is and what it entails. In the rest of this paper,
I will present and discuss six key themes in the work of de Coubertin that try to deal with
the problem of competition related to the idea of peacemaking in and through sport. These
themes are as follows:
1. the need for equality,
2. the importance of amateurism,
3. the importance of participation over victory, highlighting process over result,
4. the role of discipline (related to the necessity of self-knowledge),
5. the topic of internationalism and the nature of meeting and knowing each other,
6. the necessity for respect for others, which includes one’s friends as well as
opponents.

Equality
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One means of educating athletes to strive towards peace is the explicit recognition of the
importance of equality in sport. Equality does not (and cannot) mean that we are all the
same. Rather, equality means that athletes must accept the common rules of the sport they
are going to take part in if they want to participate in it and thus have a chance of victory.
The purpose of this act of accepting the common rules (which is always implicit in sport
participation but unfortunately not always explicit) is to guarantee that all the participants
are engaging in the same competition. Apart from ensuring the common means and aims
of the sporting activity, this makes equal competitors out of people who are not necessarily
from equal social backgrounds – in sport, you can see athletes of different social status,
nationality, race and so on (although the difference in sex is kept) competing against each
other. This point is made by de Coubertin; according to him, equality means equality of
relationships – it is related to the fact that social differences do not matter within sport
participation.10 Heather Reid highlights this aspect of Olympic Games when talking about
peace:
Perhaps even more important for the goal of peace, international contests such as those in the
Olympic Games provide an educational spectacle in which the world sees diverse people
treating each other as equals and voluntarily submitting to common rules.11
Preserving equality is what sport administrators and referees need to keep an eye on, as it is
a necessary precondition to fair competition. But it is also something that coaches and
athletes need to understand, so that they understand more clearly what kind of an
enterprise they are engaging with – what sport competition is really about. From this point
of view, cheating makes no sense because it puts a cheating athlete into a different kind of
competition than the others who are engaging, and with it an impossibility to be compared
on the same ground.

Amateurism
Another way de Coubertin sought to protect Olympism from excessive competition was to
insist that the athletes remained amateur. Amateurism was an effort to exclude financial
rewards for participation in sport. De Coubertin saw money as a huge threat to Olympism
– overriding all the values connected with Olympism, making the competition unbridled
while highlighting the reward.12 When competition is combined with financial reward, it
can get very tough, full of animosities and ill wishing for others, especially by those who
have an existential necessity to earn the financial award. This kind of competition does not
have the capacity to contribute to peace in the world. Thus amateurism, which allowed
Sport in Society 5

only athletes who did not take money for their performance, was meant to prevent the
practise of sport as work, by those existentially dependent on it. Sport was to be a means of
education, improvement and overall development – to promote living fully and joyfully;
not to be work to bring income. In this respect, de Coubertin distinguished between
Olympism and sport championships, in which this could happen; in the latter, material
gain and fame tend to override other desirable values and promote one way of
understanding – that of self-interest and gain.13
Of course, this seems to contradict the previous principle of equality, according to
which social class should be irrelevant – but not so. De Coubertin objected to the
‘amateurism’ of the British, which excluded working classes from sports that were also
their jobs. But this is to exclude people who make sport out of their work – not people
who make work out of their sport. De Coubertin was against the latter but not necessarily
the former.
Though amateurism brought a lot of problems within Olympism, since the distinction
between amateurism and professionalism was not in some cases very clear (it was hard to
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distinguish those who had taken money for their sport performance from those who had
never done so), it was a restriction that tried to keep sport competition moderate.
Nowadays, we do not have this modifier of competition any more at hand. However, while
the sport administrators succeeded in getting rid of the problem of distinguishing between
these two categories of athletes, which made this kind of decision-making easier, it has
because of that become harder to keep competition in moderation, with the high number of
professional athletes in the arena. Presently, there is not much of a difference between
some Olympic sports and sport championships in this regard. Rather, Olympic Games are
often conceived just as the highest form of sport championship.

Participation over victory


One more way of making sport competition moderate is to highlight the process of the
actual sport participation, not just the outcomes of the participation (record, victory,
reward and so on). De Coubertin reminded us of this at different places in his work, but let
us highlight just one of them: ‘What counts in life is not the victory but the struggle; the
essential thing is not to conquer but to fight well’.14 Similarly, this idea is captured by
the Olympic creed: ‘The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the fight; the
essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well’.15
Emphasizing process rather than the results of one’s striving is most importantly a task
for coaches. It is about teaching the athletes to understand better what they are doing
and who they are. The process of sport participation is not to be just any process, but a
well-lived process. The emphasis on the process moves us from the emphasis on
quantification to the highlighting of experiential qualities, such as fun, excitement, joy,
a sense of mastery and a sense of community,16 and it helps to bring people together,
even when they are competing against each other. Since we generally tend to highlight the
results of processes, rather than the processes themselves, this is something that needs to
be brought to the fore – to be reflected upon, understood and appreciated.17 Sadly, this
idea is often used by athletes only after they have lost – as a consolation.

Discipline and self-knowledge


The next way of directing athletes towards peace lies in the practice of sport itself – in our
striving to improve, and along with it the required discipline. De Coubertin believed in the
6 I. Martı́nková

improvement of the human being through sport practice. This does not necessarily mean
that all athletes achieve an ultimate perfection, but that they can improve in some degree:
‘Sports will not make angels of brutes, but there is a great possibility that they will temper
that brutality, giving the individual a bit of self-control.’18 A way of tempering one’s
‘brutality’ can be seen in the development of the kind of self-discipline that is inherent
within the practice of sport. Discipline is nurtured within training for achieving one’s best
performance, and it demands, inter alia, regular self-cultivation, strengthening one’s will,
perseverance, self-denial, daring and sacrifice.19
However, through discipline, an athlete is not supposed to become a slave but rather a
master of the self. Discipline thus demands self-knowledge, which de Coubertin derived
from the ancient Greek approach, and held as the ‘be-all and end-all of physical culture’.20
Knowing the self enables the athlete to cultivate himself or herself in a suitable and
productive way. This approach demands a constant deepening of the athlete’s
self-knowledge and the modification of training and practice accordingly, not just an
obedience to what is ordered by the coach. The result of this approach is a mature human
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being, not a machine. Thus, education oriented towards knowing the self is necessary.

Internationalism – meeting and knowing each other


In respect to peace, de Coubertin noted that people need to know not only the self but also
each other. For de Coubertin, a major contribution of sport to peacemaking is that it gives an
opportunity for people to meet each other while practicing a common activity. Meeting
others enables them to learn more deeply about and better understand each other.
The Olympic Games are, according to de Coubertin, a suitable opportunity for this purpose:
That is why every four years the restored Olympic Games must provide a happy and fraternal
meeting place for the youth of the world, a place where, gradually, the ignorance of each other
in which people live will disappear. This ignorance perpetuates ancient hatreds, increases
misunderstandings, and precipitates such barbaric events as fights to the finish.21
Knowing one’s opponents leads to overcoming ignorance and a kind of fear of the
unknown that is often associated with strangers and foreigners, and then it is much harder
to think badly about them or to consider harming them.
However, not every possibility of meeting others necessarily brings about knowledge
and understanding of one’s opponents. A certain understanding of the whole situation is
necessary here, since the meeting can be understood in different ways. If athletes are so
preoccupied with their own performance before and during competition, while trying to
beat their opponents, and then leave the site as soon as they have performed in order
to prepare for the next event, there is not much space left to learn this lesson. This scenario
often happens at the present Olympic Games, when the athletes are expected to perform
and represent their country while competing against a different athlete or a team from a
different country. This stereotype was changed at the first Youth Olympic Games, which
took place in August 2010 in Singapore. Here, the organizers made a special effort to unite
people in different ways. One of their ideas was to create mixed teams. Some sport
disciplines entailed teams of mixed sexes (archery), some sports had mixed teams from
different countries from a continent (triathlon), intercontinental mixed teams (fencing) or
even mixed sexes from different places (modern pentathlon).22
Nevertheless, it is not just Olympic Games that may perform this function. A similar
meeting point in the present-day Olympism is in ancient Olympia, where the International
Olympic Academy hosts different sessions for people from the area of sport – higher
educators, post-graduate students, sport journalists, officials of NOCs, journalists and so
Sport in Society 7

on. Apart from learning about various aspects of Olympism and participating in sports, one
of the great features of these sessions is that one meets here people from different corners
of the world that one would never meet otherwise, and through these interactions one can
learn about each other, their culture and their views.
De Coubertin highlights the idea of the necessity of knowing each other in the following
quotation, in which he connects this idea with the development of mutual respect: ‘To ask
people to love one another is merely a form of childishness. To ask them to respect each
other is not utopian, but in order to respect each other they must first know each other’.23

Respect for others


For the understanding of sport as peacemaker, another Olympic value needs to be
highlighted, which is respect for others. This value characterizes the way in which
Olympic sport is to be performed, and it can also be included in the whole concept of
fair play. Respecting others means, among other things, overcoming selfish concerns
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and personal objectives with a recognition and caring for other human beings. It is
related to friendship or camaraderie and it is also connected to mutual assistance and
sharing, which are all important topics for de Coubertin: ‘In chivalry, the idea of
competition, of effort opposing effort for the love of the effort itself, of courteous yet
violent struggle, is superimposed on the notion of mutual assistance, the basis of
camaraderie’.24 And:
Of all the forms of camaraderie to which man is inclined, perhaps none acts more forcefully
and more effectively on him than the camaraderie of sports. The shared threat of some danger,
or at least of risk, frequent mutual assistance, physical exhilaration, and the impact of a virile,
healthy undertaking all work together to make the social aspects of physical exercise pleasant
and efficacious.25
This is valid for the people within one team as well as in the whole community of practice
within a sport. Respect is about respecting not only those who are close to me but also
those who are farther away. Respect for others must thus be directed towards those who the
athlete competes with and also towards those who he competes against.
The topic of respect for one’s opponents has been discussed by many. Let us follow,
for example, the ideas of sport philosophers Drew Hyland and Scott Kretchmar. In his
paper ‘Competition and Friendship’, Hyland explains competition with relation to the
etymology of the word ‘competition’. According to him, competition means ‘to question
together, to strive together’: ‘It is a questioning of each other together, a striving together,
presumably so that each participant achieves a level of excellence that could not have been
achieved alone, without mutual striving, without the competition’.26 The basic
relationship, the initial togetherness, which is a condition for competition, forms a basis
for any comparison.
Recognition and understanding of this initial relationship leads to modification of
competition: it is no longer a mere struggling against an opponent, but rather it demands a
valuing and appreciation of the opponent, since without the opponent there could be no
possibility to compete and improve. Competing is a mutual process, and thus ‘being an
opponent’ is a positive relationship, not a negative one. This topic is also elaborated
by Kretchmar, who shows contest as a more social form of a test (the word ‘contest’ is
created from two Latin words ‘com’ and ‘testari’ meaning ‘to bear witness together’).27
Unlike a test, which is about a task to be performed, contest demands a recognition
of other competitors (‘testing families’) and a mutual emulation of one another’s
performance.
8 I. Martı́nková

In the end, this is not valid only for individual athletes, but respect for others is also
related to bigger units, such as nations. This is captured in the notion of internationalism.
For de Coubertin, internationalism means ‘respect for, not destruction of, native
countries’.28 De Coubertin says:
Healthy democracy and wise and peaceful internationalism will make their way into the new
stadium. There they will glorify the honor and selflessness that will enable athletics to carry
out its task of moral betterment and social peace, as well as physical development.29
This idea leads us further to the idea of multiculturalism, with its honour and respect for
the widest variety of human culture.30 Respect for others demands respect for difference,
otherness, which people tend to be afraid of or to denigrate. Respecting others is easier
when people know each other, as discussed above. Again, athletes should be educated
within their sport practice in relation to this understanding by their coaches, so that they
can be truly Olympic athletes.
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Conclusion
The above discussion of the six key themes in respect to peacemaking in the work of
de Coubertin shows that it is not merely the practice of sport itself that is of importance,
but also its connection to education. It is this connection that makes competition moderate
and Olympic-style competition is something special and worthwhile, different from other
kinds of competition. And it is this connection that makes it a practice that leads to peace.
If sport competition remains as excessive as it tends to be today – with its tendencies
towards competition at all costs, self-promotion and the search for fame and rewards – it
is likely that its outcomes will not be in line with Olympic values. But this is not a new
phenomenon. Already in his lifetime, de Coubertin was very well aware of this problem
and of the importance of education, and throughout his life he tried to make his Olympic
ideas more clear, so as to make Olympism more understandable to people. And this
remains a task for us as well. Thus, nowadays, if we want Olympism to be more than just
any sport competition, we need to include proper Olympic education within it.
This education is obviously based in sport practice. But this is not all – it is also connected
to an understanding of what the athlete is doing within this practice as a whole and also to
an understanding of the values connected to it.31 Without it, Olympism is just another
name for any participation in sport. Let us conclude with a quote from de Coubertin,
who left us with this message when delivering his address at the ceremony for his
70th birthday:
To sustain and guide you, nourish a triple will: the will to the physical joy which results
from intense muscular effort – even excessive and violent effort – next the will to honest,
complete and unremitting altruism... for mark well, the coming society will be altruistic or
will be nothing: choose between that and chaos; – lastly the will to understand things
as a whole.32
Now, there can arise a question concerning the relevance of de Coubertin’s ideas to the
present time, since in this paper I am discussing the thoughts of a person who lived 100
years ago. On the one hand, the ideas in this paper are still relevant to the practice of sport
in which competition is of immense interest and in which the result and consequent
rewards override different kinds of values associated with sport. In this respect, the present
situation is even more severe and does need a regulator – and most of the ideas explored
above can help us to deal with this problem. On the other hand, this does not mean that all
of de Coubertin’s ideas are relevant today. For example, in our time of a decline in sport
Sport in Society 9

participation, we should look for different ways of motivating people to participate in sport
rather than through competition, which was so important for de Coubertin. Simply said,
we need to do the same as de Coubertin – to learn from the past but not to copy the
past blindly.

Acknowledgement
The article was written with support from a Research Grant from the Ministry of Education, Youth
and Sports MSM 0021620864, Czech Republic; and institutional support PRVOUK P39.

Notes
1
de Coubertin, ‘Ode to Sport’, 630.
2
IOC, Olympic Charter, 11.
3
See, e.g. Georgiadis and Syrigos, Olympic Truce; see also the essay by Burleson in this issue.
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4
Schantz, ‘Education Sportive’.
5
de Coubertin, ‘Physical Education in the 20th Century’, 161.
6
de Coubertin, ‘Why I Revived the Olympic Games’, 543.
7
de Coubertin, ‘Why I Revived the Olympic Games’, 544.
8
de Coubertin, ‘Why I Revived the Olympic Games’, 543– 4, ‘The Philosophic Foundation of
Modern Olympism’, 581.
9
See, e.g. Tuxill and Wigmore, ‘Merely Meat’.
10
de Coubertin, ‘Sport and the Social Issue’.
11
Reid, ‘Olympic Sport’, 210.
12
de Coubertin, ‘The Neo-Olympism’.
13
de Coubertin, ‘Why I Revived the Olympic Games’.
14
de Coubertin, ‘The Trustees of the Olympic Idea’, 589.
15
The Olympic Symbols, 5.
16
Cp. Loland, ‘The Logic of Progress’.
17
Cp. Hochstetler, ‘Process and the Sport Experience’.
18
de Coubertin, ‘Sport is a Peacemaker’, 241.
19
Cp. de Coubertin, ‘Philosophy of Physical Culture’, ‘Sport is a Peacemaker’.
20
de Coubertin, ‘Philosophy of Physical Culture’, 163.
21
de Coubertin, ‘The Neo-Olympism’, 537.
22
Parry and Lucidarme, ‘Challenges of the Youth Olympic Games’.
23
de Coubertin, ‘The Philosophic Foundation of Modern Olympism’, 583.
24
de Coubertin, ‘The Philosophic Foundation of Modern Olympism’, 581.
25
de Coubertin, ‘Philosophy of Physical Culture’, 165.
26
Hyland, ‘Competition and Friendship’, 236.
27
Kretchmar, ‘From Test to Contest’.
28
de Coubertin, ‘The Neo-Olympism’, 537.
29
de Coubertin, ‘The Neo-Olympism’, 537.
30
Parry, ‘Sport and Olympism’, 195– 6.
31
Cp. Naul, Olympic Education, 19 – 23; Girginov and Parry, The Olympic Games Explained,
227– 33.
32
de Coubertin, ‘Address by Baron de Coubertin’, 243.

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