As World War I ended, Baron Pierre de Coubertin was ready to double down on his commitment to spread sport to every nation and every individual on the planet. Deeply disappointed by the cancellation of the 1916 Olympic Games, which had been scheduled to take place in Berlin before the animosities started, he began to reassert the evolving principle of sport for all. Here’s the framework of this quote in a passage he wrote in Olympic Letter XI: The Sporting Spirit of Students, which appeared in the La Gazette de Lausanne in 1919.

“All forms of sport for everyone; that is no doubt a formula which is going to be criticized as madly utopian. I do not care. I have weighed and examined it for a long time; I know it is accurate and possible. The years and the strength which remain to me will be employed to ensure its triumph; it will be my contribution to those social reforms whose principle was the basis of the pact of sacred union during this long war and whose achievement will have to be honest and swift if we do not want civilization to blow up like a boiler without a valve.”