In October of 1890, at the invitation of Dr. William Penny Brookes, who was 82 at the time, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, 27, traveled to Much Wenlock in Shropshire, England, near the Welsh border, to witness a special edition of ‘the Olympian Games,’ which Dr. Brookes had been organizing in his village for nearly 40 consecutive years. What the Baron experienced would, of course, play a seminal role in his idea to resurrect the Olympic Games two years later, but in the meantime, he wrote a stirring tribute to Dr. Brookes and his unique commitment to athletics at the heart of community life.  In December of that year, the Baron published “The Olympic Games at Much Wenlock:  A Page from the History of Athletics,” which appeared in La Revue Athlétique.  In it, the Baron offered a brief summary of the history of British athletics and their modern renaissance, naming a half dozen people and places responsible for strengthening the movement.  In this quote, he made the point it was impossible to credit any one individual for their start.

“But when you go looking for the origins of this vast movement, in order to see what those origins really were, merely tracking down the main factors will not be enough. From time to time ideas move around the world, spreading like an epidemic. It is very difficult to credit them all to a single individual. Generally one finds that, without coming to an explicit understanding or reaching an agreement among themselves, several men were working on the same task at the same time, in different places. That is what happened in England.”