Over the course of his career, Baron Pierre de Coubertin developed a philosophy of life that came to be known as Olympism.  Olympism rose out of the Baron’s personal experience of sport, his deep respect for the humanistic Hellenism of the ancients, and his own incessant desire to write and clarify his own thinking. Practically speaking, Olympism is a philosophy that anyone can live by today.  It’s five principle tenets move from the personal—human excellence—to the universal—striving for world peace—with mutual respect, friendship and international understanding as the progressive stages in between.  While Olympism was never codified into the systematic philosophy or theology found in other major worldviews, it nevertheless offers an inspiring, hopeful and optimistic framework for living.  And as the Baron said, it’s essence is found everywhere in the sphere of sport.  This quote came from the Baron’s “Program of the Lausanne Olympic Congress of 1913,” the congress where he also unveiled his design for the five Olympic rings.  That program appeared in the April 1912 edition of the Olympic Review.

“Each sport develops or utilizes (specific) intellectual and moral qualities—solitude and companionship, independence and cooperation, initiative and discipline, formation and training ... Does not activity in the sphere of sport contain within itself the germ of a practical philosophy of life?”