Baron Pierre de Coubertin launched the Olympic Games as a worldwide festival of youth--with the stated purpose of gathering the finest young athletes from around the world for the Games. Since many of those athletes would be university students, the Baron believed they would become his frontline ambassadors of Olympism. Throughout his life, he entertained high hopes that his student athletes would lead a revolution to establish social peace by spreading the philosophy of Olympism far and wide.

"University students, messengers of knowledge and imagination, will constitute the most active battalions in this great task; let us say if you wish that they will have to be its aviators. Now I have said, and I repeat, that sport by reason of its potent physical and moral effects will be an inestimable instrument in their hands for the establishment of social peace. They must therefore know how to handle it with tact and how to derive the maximum effect from it. Popular Olympism is about to be born; let the students prepare to serve it."

He recorded these ideas after World War I ended in Olympic Letter XI, which appeared in the Olympic Review in 1919.