Coubertin Quote for Feb, 03
During each Olympiad, I read that it will be the last because … Because, if you really want to know, the reporter (one has to see the facts as they are) was poorly accommodated, was overcharged in a restaurant, or because the telegraph or telephone did not work as it should. This is only human.Share
As we enter the week that will begin the Pyeongchang Olympic Winter Games, the media is surprisingly empty of the usual predictions of disaster and the imminent demise of the Games. This refreshing trend—let’s hope it continues—is undoubtedly the result of the overwhelmingly positive feelings engendered by the Olympic détente between North and South Korea. Seeing the Olympic team from North Korea arrive at the Olympic Village with beaming smiles, reinforces the idea that sport can bring us together as nothing else can. It also reminds us that the ideal of friendship and peace through sport launched by Baron Pierre de Coubertin still has a vital role to play in our world.
The Baron would be immensely pleased with all of this, particularly by the absence of the usual forecasts of doom in the press before the Games. In the last chapter of his Olympic Memoirs, looking back on the journalistic coverage of the first nine editions of the Olympic Games between 1896 to 1932, the Baron explained the origins of such negative Olympic predictions in very human terms, tongue in check, I’d say, exercising a little humor.