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A Profile of Modern Olympic Spirit
The Beijing Olympics are almost here, but not many remember Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who restored the Olympic Games in 1896. The spirit with which the ancient Games were revived and Coubertin's objectives seem to belong to a bygone era, though remembering the first steps of Olympism is inspiring. Coubertin was a man of exceptional talent; he was not only an organiser, a pedagogue, a historian, a sportsman, a writer, an aesthete, but also a visionary, a great humanist and a man of action. Olympism was for him nothing else than the 'religion of mankind'. Born in a French aristocratic family in 1863, as a young man Coubertin decided to work in education, the only field where he thought he could bring about changes for the good of humanity. Though Coubertin liked to call himself a 'rebel', he was first and foremost a pioneer much ahead of his time. It is in the realm of sports that he thought to apply his educational concepts. Coubertin, himself an accomplished sportsman, saw a relation between sports and character formation; his main objective was to 'build men'. Very few believed in his revolutionary vision, but he decided nevertheless to start the process of restoring the ancient quadrennial Games. On June 23, 1894, he founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at a function at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Though the first Olympics Games of modern era, held in Olympia in Greece in 1896, were a success, he was dissatisfied. In his Memoires Olympiques, he wrote in 1931: "In [Olympia], we had, so to say only sports techniques dressed in historical gowns; no congress, no conference, no moral preoccupation or apparent pedagogy." In reviving the Games, he hoped to bring back the "intellectual, philosophical and moral" characteristics of the ancient Games. To fulfil his objective, Coubertin decided to organise the first Olympic Congress at Le Havre in France in 1897. How to produce men 'morally, intellectually and physically robust'? He believed that it was essential to develop the character of men and not to break it, as happened in many schools of that time (and today's). During the Congress, Henri Didon, his friend and collaborator, made it clear that their objective was to build beings independent in their thinking and strong in their body. "There is more glory to train a free man, with his own personal initiative than a hundred docile men, incapable to assume any responsibility." This Congress marked the infant steps of the Olympic movement. The ideals preached by Coubertin were similar to the ones of Ancient Greece; body, mind and spirit should be developed simultaneously to produce complete beings. The purpose of education in ancient India was not different. Coubertin's interpretation of the Olympic motto, Fortius, Citius, Altius, is fascinating. Fortius (stronger) referred to the field of sport. The body had to be trained by repeated exercises to become healthier and stronger. Citius (swifter) was connected with literary and scientific studies and the domain of the mind in general which had to be constantly educated like the body. Altius (higher) had a deeper meaning connected with the sacred, with the soul or God, whatever name one calls it. All three levels had their importance; in common was the centrality of the 'effort' to reach the determined goal. According to the spirit which presided over the restoration of the Olympic Games, 'perfection' was not the ultimate objective, the 'effort' to attain this goal was more significant. We all know the Olympic Creed: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." The knowledge and mastery of oneself, generosity and respect for others and an enthusiasm for the 'effort' was essential not only on the sports ground or in class, but in life as well. In education, Coubertin believed that sports should have as much importance as science, literature and arts. Sports had the capacity to stimulate the thought process and concentration. Can we hope that these values will be remembered during the XXIXth Olympiad in Beijing?
The Olympics journey: from 776B.C. to Beijing 2008
The ancient Olympics, during which the warrior-sportsmen proved their skills, were held for more than 1,200 years. The first confirmed Olympics took place in 776 B.C., while the last were held in 394 A.D, after which they were banned by the Roman Emperor Theodosius because, he said, they were pagan festivals. For a millennium and a half, mankind forgot about sports. Different contests continued to be held, and the Middle Ages saw impressive tournaments between knights, but they hardly qualified as sporting competitions. During this period, people had no time for sports because of the disappearance of a common centre of civilisation, a role that Greece and later Rome played for more than a thousand years. The ancient tradition was revived only in the late 19th century, when Europe once again came to perceive itself as a common civilisation. A French nobleman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was the author of the idea. He pursued two goals - to make sports more popular at home (he believed that poor physical shape of French soldiers was one of the reasons for the defeat in the 1870-71 war with Prussia), and to unite different countries through peaceful competitions, which he considered the best way of avoiding wars. The first modern Olympic games were held in Athens in 1896. In the following decades the Olympic movement had to fight for survival, because none of the major powers was interested in Courbertin's ideas. The Games in 1900 and 1904, combined with world exhibitions in Paris and Saint Louis, were not very popular because they were too long and lacked spectacular events. The Olympic movement grew stronger by the fourth Games in London, which attracted some 2,000 athletes, more than the number of athletes in all the previous Games put together. As a complicated social and political phenomenon, big-time sports emerged in the 1930s when the Third Reich tried to use the Berlin Games to prove the "Aryan race's supremacy" to the whole world. This phenomenon became fully established in the 1950s, when Soviet-US competition was transferred to the sports ground. From then on, the idea of sports independent of politics ceased to exist. Sports were not only subject to politics, but became a major part of it. The superpowers could not afford an open armed clash and Olympics and other international arenas became the only places where the confrontation between Soviet Union and the US, could be fought in real time. John F. Kennedy said that two things determined a nation's prestige - space flights and Olympic gold medals. This was probably the most honest motto of the Cold War. Big-time sports became part of this war, with teams turned into military units, and sports ground into battlefields. For the Soviet team, the 1972 Munich Games were very convincing revenge for the defeat by the Americans in the non-official point-count in Mexico four years before. The Soviets simply could not afford to lose in the year of the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary. Soviet athletes won 99 medals, including 50 gold, one third more than the Americans. The crowning glory came in the Basketballhalle, where the Soviet team was competing in the finals against the Americans, the absolute favourite which had not lost a single Olympic game in several decades running. The last three seconds allowed Alexander Belov to score the victory in this incredible game. Regrettably for all sports lovers, this long-standing confrontation was marred by two boycotts. The US and many other western countries refused to attend the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, and the Soviet Union reciprocated by boycotting the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. The Soviet Union proved its worth in Seoul in 1988. It received 132 medals, including 55 gold, which compared to 94 and 36 American medals, respectively. The US came third after East Germany. The Soviet triumph took place in Barcelona in 1992. The Soviet Union had already collapsed by that time, and a "combined team" played under the Olympic, rather than the Soviet, flag. It won 112 medals, including 45 gold, against the United States' 108 and 37. In the Atlanta and the Sydney Games in 1996 and 2000, the Russian team ranked second in the non-official point-count, and was third in Athens in 2004. World's athletes have gathered to compete in Beijing. China's economic and political might has been steadily growing in the last few years, and Beijing hopes to win the Game in the non-official point-count. The US wants to preserve its global lead, while Russia will have to fight hard to regain its lost positions.
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In ancient times, sports originated as peacetime rivalries between warriors. Running, boxing, wrestling, chariots racing were all elements of their military training and the best of them demonstrated their skills in competitive games.
I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold