The ideals of Hellenism were at work in the ancient Olympic Games, turning the festival of sport into a broader celebration of the arts and intellect, celebrating the national passions of the Greeks in an original form of humanism.  Baron Pierre de Coubertin wanted to revive that ancient spirit as he resurrected the Olympic Games, but he also wanted to ensure that the Games launched in 1896 were thoroughly modern.  He knew his modern Olympic Movement—and the ideals it embodied—had little chance of survival if they failed to deliver a message relevant to the contemporary world.  A century and twenty years later, it looks like he succeeded.  This quote comes from a passage in “Why I Revived the Olympic Games,” an article that appeared in the British Fortnightly Review in 1908.  

“(In reviving Olympism) we must be resolutely modern. Let us have no clumsy and tactless restitutions. It is possible to draw inspiration from the past without copying it ... In this order of ideals all is yet to be done; but much has been prepared in the path of progress.”