With the devastating ruins of World War I still smoldering in Europe, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, always a keen observer of political and social circumstance, wrote a letter to the members of the International Olympic Committee emphasizing some of the pitfalls ahead as they sought to restart the Games once again. From the beginning of his career, Coubertin had viewed sport as a platform for achieving a form of social equality on the field of play—and extending it across all nations through the Olympic Movement. Coubertin always viewed sport as a means to a greater end. In this particular letter to his colleagues, which was written in January 1919, he touched again on a theme he often repeated, that sport had a role to play in the development of democracy and social peace. Here's the passage from which the paraphrase above was constructed.

"The recent war was won by the Western powers thanks to a "sacred union," based on the conviction that the two-fold stakes of the fight were the political freedom of States, and the social equality of individuals. If we were to forget the second goal after achieving the first, civilization would run the risk of exploding like a boiler without a safety-valve."