In the year he turned 71, it was clear that Baron Pierre de Coubertin had lost none of his ardent admiration for the ancient Greeks and the philosophy of life they created.  He believed the world would eventually embrace the ancient humanism of the Hellas—leavened with modern ideas and inventions—and spread its values around the earth.  In a “An Open Letter to My Hellenic Friends,” in April of 1934, the Baron was adamant that the modern world would return again to the Hellenic ideal. 

“After overcoming its modernist agitation, and fully accepting the good and useful things provided by scientific progress, by the very force of ideas and things modern society will return to the Hellenic ideal, the most sensible and the most profound of all the ideas that men have striven to put into practice.”