Worldwide, sport is most often viewed today as a global, commercial industry whose values are suspect at best—and not as a gleaming moral force.  Even the Olympic Games, which still draw an enormous audience, have lost some of their golden sheen due to crises, corruption and controversies. Part of the problem, of course, is communications.  If the public at large new the true story of the Olympic Movement, which was founded to foster a world unified by friendship and peace through sport, its philosophic values would ring with greater truth.  Unfortunately, the story of the Olympic Movement is widely unknown.  Baron Pierre de Coubertin recognized that the Olympic Movement would need continual inner renewal to fulfill its physical and moral obligations to society.  He called for a transforming renewal in his “Letter to the Members of the International Olympic Committee” in January of 1919, from which today’s quote is taken.

“(Sport is) an unequaled agent for physical and moral health in our time ... One can readily understand that in the face of such boundless duties, the athletic world needs to renew itself, to expand its bases, and to transform its inner workings.”