PIERRE DE COUBERTIN

A life dedicated to the revival of the Olympic Games

　　Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, was born in Paris in 1863. His family originated in Normandy where he spent many of his summers in the family Château de Mirville, near Le Havre. He refused the military career planned for him by his family, as well as renouncing a promising political career. By the age of 24 he had already decided the aim of his life: he would help bring back the noble spirit of France by reforming its old-fashioned and unimaginative education system. Coubertin, whose father was an artist and mother a musician, was raised in cultivated and aristocratic surroundings. He had always been deeply interested in questions of education. For him, education was the key to the future of society, and he sought the means to make France rise once more after its defeat in the war in 1870. 　

　　Coubertin was a very active sportsman and practiced the sports of boxing, fencing, horse-riding and rowing. He was convinced that sport was the springboard for moral energy and he defended his idea with rare tenacity. It was this conviction that led him to announce at the age of 31 that he wanted to revive the Olympic Games. He made this announcement in a meeting at the Union of French Societies of Athletic Sports (USFSA), for which he was Secretary General. No one really believed him and his statement was greeted with little enthusiasm. 　

　　Coubertin, however, was not discouraged and on 23 June, 1894 he founded the International Olympic Committee in a ceremony held at the University of Sorbonne in Paris. Demetrius Vikelas from Greece became the first president of the IOC. Two years later, in 1896, the first Olympic Games of the modern era were held in Athens. On that occasion Coubertin was elected the second president of the IOC and he remained president until 1925. Due to the 1st World War, Coubertin requested permission to establish the headquarters of the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was a neutral country. On 10 April 1915 the acts ensuring the establishment of the international administrative centre and archives of the modern Olympic movement were signed in the Town Hall of Lausanne. In 1922, the IOC headquarters and the Museum collections were moved to the Villa Mon Repos in Lausanne and stayed there for the next 46 years.　　　

　　Pierre de Coubertin also wanted to be seen as a pedagogue. All of his projects, including the Games, had the same aim in mind: to make men. His definition of Olympism had four principles that were far from a simple sports competition:To be a religion i.e. to "adhere to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection"；to represent an elite "whose origins are completely egalitarian" and at the same time "chivalry" with its moral qualities；to create a truce "a four-yearly festival of the springtime of mankind"；and to glorify beauty by the "involvement of the philosophic arts in the Games". It is clear that the concept of the Olympic Games is far from a simple sports competition.　　

　　Pierre de Coubertin withdrew from the IOC and the Olympic Movement in 1925 to devote himself to his pedagogical work, which he termed his "unfinished symphony". At the age of 69, in 1931, he published his "Olympic Memoirs" in which he emphasized the intellectual and philosophical nature of his enterprise and his wish to "place the role of the IOC, right from the start, very much above that of a simple sports association". Pierre de Coubertin suddenly died of a heart attack on 2 September, 1937, in a park in Geneva, and thus his "symphony" remained unfinished. The city of Lausanne had decided to award him honorary citizenship of the city, but he died just prior to the ceremony. In accordance with Pierre de Coubertin's last wishes, he was buried in Lausanne and his heart was placed inside a stele erected to his memory at Olympia.

　　皮埃尔·德·顾拜旦
　　(Pierre de Coubertin,1863.1.1-1937.9.2)
　　1863-1937　出生于法国，于日内瓦过世
　　1894-1925　任国际奥委会委员
　　1894-1896　担任国际奥委会秘书长
　　1896-1925　出任国际奥委会第二任主席
　　1925　　　 以国际奥委会荣誉主席身份退休
　　
　　重大业绩：
　　现代奥林匹克运动创始人，史学家，教育家，致力于文艺活动，1894年在他积极努力和多方筹措下，召开了巴黎国际体育会议，促进了国际奥委会的成立，任职期间对有关奥运会之举办、组织等完成详尽规划，堪称现代奥运会之父。1912年斯德哥尔摩奥运会时，发表了著名诗作《体育颂》，另著有《运动心理学试验》（1913）和《竞技运动教育学》（1919）等。1937年9月2日病逝于日内瓦，其遗体葬在国际奥委会总部所在地洛桑，心脏则埋在奥林匹克运动发源地奥林匹亚。