This quote is historically important because it is drawn from Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s first public proposal to resurrect the Olympic Games on November 25, 1892 at the Sorbonne.  His proposal fell flat on its face; he failed miserably at this first attempt. He had not done the advance preparatory work necessary to engage his audience fully in his vision.  They did not understand the full import of his proposal to restore the Olympics and simply wished him luck. Eighteen months later, in June of 1984, he would correct that mistake and successfully resurrect the Games.  But what’s important about his first failed proposal is the context he created for the relationship between international progress, sport and peace. At the end of his long speech on Physical Exercises in the Modern World, he essentially positions sport—and the Olympic Games—as a platform for peace.  Here’s the end of his message:

“There are people whom you call utopians when they talk to you about the disappearance of war, and you are not altogether wrong; but there are others who believe in the progressive reduction in the chances of war, and I see no utopia in this. It is clear that the telegraph, railways, the telephone, the passionate research in science, congresses and exhibitions have done more for peace than any treaty or diplomatic convention. Well, I hope that athletics will do even more. Those who have seen 30,000 people running through the rain to attend a football match will not think that I am exaggerating. Let us export rowers, runners and fencers; there is the free trade of the future, and on the day when it is introduced within the walls of old Europe the cause of peace will have received a new and mighty ally. This is enough to encourage your servant to dream now about the second part of this program; he hopes that you will help him as you help him hitherto, and that with you he will able to continue and complete, on a basis suited to the conditions of modern life, this grandiose and salutary task, the restoration of the Olympic Games.”