As the Olympic Games progressed through their first sixteen years, it became clear to many observers of elite competition that superior training methods led to championship performances.  A great proponent of refined training methods, Baron Pierre de Coubertin sought to popularize the best practices and ensure that all national Olympic teams had access to them.  As he prepared the program for the 1913 Olympic Congress in Lausanne, which was set to focus on the psychological and physical aspects of training and competition, the baron began to outline the numerous benefits of training beyond muscular development.  This passage appeared in the Olympic Review in April, 1912, as part of the introduction to the agenda of the upcoming Lausanne Congress.

“Normal training may be purely physical and result only in resistance to fatigue, but it may also contribute to moral progress by the development of the will, of courage and of self-confidence, and also to intellectual progress by producing self-possession and mental sanity.”