Like every great entrepreneur, Baron Pierre de Coubertin hoped his legacy would live on long after he was gone.  One the one hand, he was confident it would.  He had often voiced the idea that modern Olympism was now part of history and nothing would stop its advance.  On the other hand, he fretted that his movement might end.  More than likely, the controversies swirling around the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games embedded some of those doubts into his thinking. As he wrote “The Unfinished Symphony” that year, which was supposed to be the final volume of his Olympic Memoirs, he expressed some of those concerns.  He need not have worried, of course. Capable leaders had stepped forward. And then, after World War II, the world rallied to the Baron’s cause and infused the Olympic Games with a resiliency that turned his legacy into the most successful international movement of our times.

“What worries me most is the difficulty of finding those who will take over and continue the work I have started.”