ORGANIZED GREEK GAMES

Organized Greek Games

Organized Greek Games

Although a number of nineteenth-century Europeans endeavored to revive the ancient Olympics, none succeeded. W. P. Brookes inaugurated a series of annual “Olympian Games” in Shropshire in 1849. They were purely local affairs in which rural folk participated in traditional pastimes. In 1859, the Greeks made the first of several attempts to revive the Olympics, but their games, local and limited to ethnic Greeks, were unnoticed by the rest of the world (Young, 1996, 75). In 1891, John Astley Cooper boldly proposed a grand Pan-Britannic and Anglo-Saxon Festival, but it was not until 1930 that his dream was partially realized in the form of the British Empire Games (Morris, 1983, 80).

In 1894, Coubertin convened an international conference at the Sorbonne, ostensibly to discuss amateurism in sports. Seated in a grand auditorium whose walls were decorated with classical murals by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the delegates were aurally seduced by the ancient “Hymn to Apollo,” discovered the previous year at Delphi, set to music by Gabriel Fauré, and sung by Jeanne Remade and the chorus of the Opéra Francais. In this carefully constructed milieu, Coubertin suggested that an International Olympic Committee (IOC) be organized to revive the ancient games. The delegates agreed and Coubertin selected the members. Some of them, like the American William Milligan Sloane and the Czech Jiri Guth-Jarkowvsky, were energetic and able men; others were titled aristocrats whom Coubertin chose for their prestige (MacAloon, 1981, 63).

To this day, the IOC selects its own members, all of whom are supposed to represent the Olympic movement rather than their country.

Athens was chosen as the most appropriate site for the revived games and a Greek man of letters, Demetrios Bikelas, was chosen as the first IOC president. Coubertin controlled the program for the games and created ...