Coubertin crafted this line as part of his poem, Ode to Sport, which won the gold medal in the cultural competition at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games.  He had submitted it under the pseudonym of Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach to ensure the judges showed no favoritism toward him.  Coubertin’s gold medal must have given him great satisfaction, but not as much as the Stockholm cultural competition itself.  He had always envisioned the Olympic Games as a grand festival of sport and culture, and after years of planning he had finally managed to integrate five categories of cultural competition—architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture—into the fifth modern Olympic Games.  Here’s the full passage from this section of his ode:

“O Sport! … There can be no beauty without balance and proportion, and you are the peerless master of both, for you create harmony, you give movements rhythm, you make strength graceful and you endow suppleness with power.”