Anyone who has worked in the Olympic Movement knows that progress is only made through agreement of all or most parties—and agreement requires meetings that can often be contentious.  Like so many other major institutions or organizations, the Olympic Movement operates by bringing together people of different opinions and perspectives for the long and often perplexing discussions required to find common ground.  Baron Pierre de Coubertin had been through hundreds of these Olympic meetings when he convened a sub-commission to establish, among other things, a permanent program for future Olympic Games.  The committee, with representatives from seven countries*, met in Basel, Switzerland on March 27-28, 1912.  They were charged with preparing recommendations to be presented to the full Session of the IOC at the Stockholm Olympic Games that summer.  The work went so well—and was so agreeable to the Baron—that he called it “an epoch-marking event in the history of the Olympic Movement” and expressed his hope that all future meetings would carry the same productive tone. Here’s part of his summary from an article in the Olympic Review that May. 

“Again the harmonious tone of the meeting has to be mentioned. Nothing that could have happened would have been more welcome; and the signs, that differences are disappearing, that the sword - for in some cases it was almost war - is being sheathed, are most encouraging to all those who have the furtherance of the true aim of the Olympic movement at heart. Let peace and progress remain the keynote of the future meetings: because only then the fullest amount of good derivable from the Olympic movement can be enjoyed.”

*Eugen Brunetta d'Usseaux (Italy), Godefroy de Blonay (Switzerland), Ernest Callot (France), Robert de Courcy Laffan (Great Britain), William Sloane (USA), Christiaan van Tuyll (Holland), Karl von Venningen-Ullner (Germany).