In the spontaneous youthful celebrations that followed the first Olympic Games across Greece, Baron Pierre de Coubertin saw the fulfillment of his dream.  The heroic and patriotic festival of the first Olympics had worked its magic, planting the seeds of Olympism in the hearts of the young.  In this first taste of the inspirational power of the Games, the Baron saw the full promise of the future, an Olympic Movement spreading the spirit of sport and play all over the world.  This quote appears in “The First Olympiad (Athens 1896)” in the Baron’s Olympic Memoirs. 

 “(After the first games), throughout the provinces of Greece and on all Greek islands, small boys, as they ran out of school, amused themselves ‘playing at the Olympic Games.’ After having run, jumped and thrown a few stones just for the fun of it, they formed up into a procession, and the biggest of them, suddenly becoming serious, would hand the others an olive branch. This symbolic gesture made in Athens again, after so many centuries had elapsed, gave them an unconscious contact with their great past that they vaguely sensed.”