If you’ve ever attended the Olympic Games and witnessed its most solemn and moving rituals, you will know what Baron Pierre de Coubertin is talking about.  At those moments,  there is an unmistakable sense of transcendence in the air, a tangible, palpable mystical feeling that is often called the Olympic spirit.  It is that spirit that animates the belief of millions in the idealism of the Olympic movement—that fills so many people with hope that our world can find the common ground of friendship and peace through sport.  The Baron wrote often about his religious perspective on sport and Olympism.  This passage is found in his Olympic Memoirs, a thin volume of 141 pages written in 1930 and still published by the IOC today. 

“My own conception of sport has always been very different from that of a large number—perhaps the majority—of sportsmen. To me, sport is a religion with its own church, dogmas and service, but above all it is a religious feeling ... a festival of universal youth, ‘the springtime of mankind.’”