Pierre de Coubertin and the introduction of organised sport in France

Dados Bibliográficos

ID10073691
AutoresEugen Weber (0000-0002-0339-3810, autor correspondente)
Ano1970
Volume5
Fascículo2
Páginas3-26
Data de publicação1970-04-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200947000500201
OpenAlexW2054924654
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas10

Watching the Olympic Games of I968, remembering that they had been reinvented by a Frenchman three-quarters of a century before, I found it odd that the chief sporting manifestation of our time should be attributed to a nation not overly given to sport, one whose athletic tradition hardly compares with those of her English or German neighbours, one in which games of every kind were beginning to spread only as the nineteenth century ended. An early legend attributes the origin of Olympic games to Pelops' triumph in a chariot race which he had won by bribing his rival's groom. But we cannot assume that this symbolic coincidence of mores lay behind the nineteenth-century resurgence of rites going back to the second millennium BC even though the pediment of the great temple of Zeus at Olympia depicts this appropriately equivocal sporting victory. The man responsible for the revival and for the paradoxes it suggests Baron Pierre de Coubertin could not at first be found either in the Petit Larousse or in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Given the paucity of material, these pages are a simple reconnaissance into debatable ground, suggesting some ways in which sporting activities fit and illuminate other aspects of the fin de siecle

Ancient history · Annals · Art · Art history · Chariot · Epigraph · German · Legend · Literature · Mores · Political science · Politics · Victory · Classics · History · Law · Physical education and sports games research · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society