One of the greatest challenges Baron Pierre de Coubertin faced at the outset of his career was creating unity between the various clubs and associations that governed French sport in the 1880s.  He succeeded in getting most of them to agree on a standard set of rules for competition and that led to broader agreements, but the hard lessons he learned in that bruising environment led him to insist on equality between all sports in the Olympic Games.  Equal footing for all sports became a founding principle of the modern Games. Today, of course, there is a clear hierarchy among the sports in the Olympic Games.  The share of revenues for each sport is based on various indexes such as ticket sales and the television audience they draw during the broadcasts. It would have been impossible, however, for the Baron to have launched the Games without establishing equality among all the sports participating.  Few would have signed up for the grand festival if they thought they were going to be treated as a second or third tier competition. This quote is a paraphrase of a passage from All Sports, an article the Baron wrote for the Olympic Review in 1910.

“There can be nothing Olympic outside the contact and cooperation of the various branches of sports, united on a footing of total equality for the improvement of humanity."