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THE MODERN OLYMPICS TAKE SHAPE

The First Olympic Congress
Two famous Belgians

In 1894 de Coubertin organized an international gathering, which he called an ‘Olympic Congress’ at Paris’s medieval university the Sorbonne, then noted for its indifference to sport. The Sorbonne gathering followed a long, hard campaign by de Coubertin to arouse the enthusiasm of his fellow Frenchmen in which, despairingly, he appealed to their sense of patriotism. De Coubertin informed his audience that in the 18th century, ‘The England of those days knew only two distractions: doing business more or less honestly and getting drunk more or less completely,’ whereas now, ‘Wherever they go in the world the English take a tennis racket and a Bible.’ Moreover, he told his audience, ‘English athletics, gentlemen, only recently began and it is already taking over the world. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge started to associate themselves with it, Thomas Arnold gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education [as we have seen, this was nonsense], playing fields sprang up all over England...When they left their native land the sons of Albion took the precious recipe with them and athletics flowed into the two hemispheres... Soon the cornerstone of the British Empire had been laid.’ He even quoted Prime Minister William Gladstone as confirming: ‘That is right. That is how things happened.’ De Coubertin assured his listeners that ‘Athens is being reborn on the foggy banks of the Thames’ and referred to ‘Thomas Arnold who, more than any other Englishman, is responsible for the current prosperity and prodigious expansion of his country.’ Arnold would surely have been amazed but de Coubertin had made his point. The gathering ended with the singing of a ‘Delphic Hymn to Apollo’ which had just been discovered during excavations at the site of the Delphic oracle, set to music by no less a composer than Gabriel Fauré. The British delegation, which was the largest, included the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who was not noted for his athletic prowess. He was one of several Britons who were made Honorary Members of the Congress, along with the future Prime Minister A.J. Balfour and William Penny Brookes who was prevented by illness from attending. De Coubertin urged his audience to ‘export runners, rowers and fencers’. The first International Olympic Committee was formed at this event to run the first Modern Olympics, in Athens in 1896. The Times was unenthusiastic, arguing that the attempt to revive the games was futile.

William Gladstone

PRETTY FANNY

A.J. Balfour was no athlete and his delicacy in manner and appearance earned him the name ‘Pretty Fanny’. His contribution to the world of sport was to substitute the name lawn tennis for the game previously known by the unpronounceable sphairistike. He also gave the language the expression ‘Bob’s your uncle’ since he owed his early political elevation to his uncle the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, whose name was Robert.

Following the Congress, Demetrious Vikelas became the first President of the IOC. This came as a surprise to Vikelas. He attended the Congress simply as a representative of the Pan-Hellenic Gymnastic Club and found himself voted into office because de Coubertin thought that the President of the IOC should be from the country that was to host the Olympics, as Athens duly did two years later. It was at this Congress, moreover, that de Coubertin persuaded his fellow Olympians that the games should be ‘ambulatory’, moving around the world between cities, rather than permanently based in Greece. Vikelas duly handed over to Pierre de Coubertin after two years, the second Games of the modern era being held in Paris, capital of de Coubertin’s native France though de Coubertin soon forgot his belief that the presidency should pass to a citizen of the host nation, keeping the office for himself for 29 years!

The first IOC had 15 members representing 11 countries (Britain, Italy and France each had two members), one of the countries represented being Bohemia and another the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only nine people have ever held the post of president. No Briton has ever been elected president but two Belgians have held the post, one of them being the current president, Jacques Rogge. Two hundred and five National Olympic Committees now comprise the Olympic movement, with over one hundred representatives sitting on the IOC itself whose members must speak in French or English. The IOC is based at Lausanne in Switzerland and its affairs are managed by an executive committee consisting of the president, four vice-presidents and ten other members who are elected by the full membership. The IOC makes a number of special awards including the ‘Pierre de Coubertin Medal’ for an athlete who has shown exceptional sportsmanship.

SALT LAKE CITY BID SCANDAL

The IOC has sometimes been involved in controversy. In December 1998 it was suggested that members of the IOC had accepted bribes to award the Winter Olympics of 2002 to Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Ten members of the IOC were expelled and another ten were sanctioned. In 2006 it was suggested that the Japanese city of Nagano had provided excessive hospitality to members of the IOC, the Winter Olympics having been held there in 1998. Similar allegations were levelled against Atlanta after 1996 but supporting documentation could not be found and the allegations were never substantiated.

The Olympic Charter
From two sentences to five chapters

The first Olympic Charter was adopted at the 1894 Congress, based on principles set out by William Penny Brookes at Much Wenlock. The 1894 Charter simply stated that: ‘The activity of the Olympic movement is permanent and universal. It reaches its peak with the bringing together of the athletes of the world at the great sport festival – the Olympic Games.’ The Charter has since become a much more elaborate and lengthy document with five chapters and sixty-one articles. It defines the mission of the Olympic Games; the role of the IOC and of other governing bodies of sports (for example, football, tennis and rugby) and their relationship with the IOC; the role of National Olympic Committees; and the processes by which the host cities will be chosen and the Olympic Games managed. The Charter specifies that all correspondence and debate must be conducted in English or French, an acknowledgement of the central role that both nations played in promoting the creation of the Modern Olympics. The Charter has often struggled to cope with such developments as doping and the conflict between amateurs and professionals.

Difficulties over definitions of amateurism arose from an early stage, and not just in the Olympic movement. William Penny Brookes at Much Wenlock was firmly committed to the amateur ethos, awarding prizes of nominal value as in the case of ‘The Old Women’s Race for a Pound of Tea’ and probably helped to instil this into de Coubertin though the Frenchman’s views were ambiguous. For example, in 1894, the year of the Congress, he publicly criticized the amateurism of English rowing at Henley and elsewhere, arguing that its exclusion of working-class athletes was wrong. While he believed that athletes should not be paid to be such, he did think that compensation should be paid to athletes who lost wages when they were competing (though not while they were training) and would otherwise have been earning money. Following the establishment of a definition for an amateur athlete at the 1894 Congress, he continued to argue that this definition should be amended as necessary and as late as 1909 argued that the Olympic movement should develop its definition of amateurism gradually. At an Olympic Congress in Prague in 1925, the last over which de Coubertin presided, it was agreed that athletes could be reimbursed for up to 15 days of expenses and a competitor had to declare ‘on my word of honour that I am an amateur in accordance with the Olympic rules on amateurism’. Anomalies remained. Schools’ sports instructors, deriving their income from sport, were allowed to compete while skiing instructors were banned, leading to a boycott of the Winter Olympics by Austria and Switzerland.

JULES RIMET

The anomalies that remained as a result of the Prague Agreement on amateurism were not enough to satisfy another Frenchman whose name is as honoured in sport as that of de Coubertin. Jules Rimet never played football (fencing was his preference) but he was convinced that the sport, already played on every continent, would bring people together. He believed that the amateur code of the Olympics unfairly penalized players of the working-class game and, as President of FIFA from 1921 to 1954, abandoned his attempts to incorporate football satisfactorily in the Olympics, pursuing instead the goal of a separate competition which became the first World Cup for the Jules Rimet Trophy in Uruguay in 1928. He thereby created an institution which is the chief rival to the Olympics as an international sporting spectacle.

Many injustices were undoubtedly committed in the name of amateurism, beginning with the fate of Jim Thorpe, ‘the greatest athlete in the world’. In effect, the strict imposition of the amateur code conferred an advantage on wealthy individuals with private incomes whose training did not have to be interrupted by anything as tiresome as work, like Lord Burghley. The problem became much worse after the 1948 London Games with the entry to the Olympics of Soviet bloc athletes who were professionals in all but name but whose presence was tolerated on pragmatic grounds – the games would have lacked credibility without them. The Americans responded with sports scholarships and the situation remained rife with hypocrisy until 1986 when the requirement for amateur status was removed from the Olympic Charter though certain restrictions remained on professional boxers and wrestlers.