Baron Pierre de Coubertin believed in the nobility of sport—that sport brought out the noble virtues of humanity.  He believed that all sports had to be celebrated together in the Olympic Games in order to best serve the diversity of human sporting experience.  He was adamant that in the Olympics, all sports deserved equal footing.  That is the argument he was making in this passage from the article, “All Sports,” which appeared in the Olympic Review in 1910. 

“What is beautiful is noble, not one sport or another in and of itself, but the way in which it is played, the spirit that drives it, the soul that man brings to it. There can be nothing Olympic outside the contact and cooperation of the various branches of sports, united on a footing of total equality for the improvement of humanity.”