The Stockholm 1912 Olympic Games were the first to fully achieve Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s vision of a worldwide sports festival with awe-inspiring athletic feats, a fully engaged public, an enchanting atmosphere and a marriage of sport and culture.  As he delivered his closing remarks at the end of the Games, he noted that the Swedish experience had offered proof that the Olympics could achieve the ends he had envisioned for the Games, fostering harmony between the participants and helping them all to understand one another’s cultures. His remarks were reprinted in the Olympic Review after the Games.

“Above all one must have a high and serene conception of the twofold role to which sport can and must aspire within the great modern democracies - the role of agent of human equilibrium inherited from the athletics of antiquity and the role of social educator inherited from medieval chivalry. We must look not only towards the Olympic gymnasium, Gentlemen, but also towards those much-neglected and much-misunderstood tournaments of the middle ages, whose only fault was sometimes to push beyond reason the elegant cult of honor, stoicism and generosity.”