ABSTRACT
The involvement of universities and colleges with the modern Olympic and Paralympic Games dates back to the late nineteenth century, when founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin was inspired to start the event after visiting several institutions, mostly in England, Ireland, the United States and Canada.1 Coubertin joined the liberal, republican classicist intellectuals by writing in the journal La Reforme Sociale (the combined organ of two organisations, the Société d’économie sociale and the Unions de la paix sociale), where his first thoughts and expressions about l’education athlétique and la pédagogie sportive were expressed. Both organisations were founded and led by Frédéric Le Play, a sociologist and social philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century whom Coubertin admired. Le Play’s work had raised much criticism but also received much recognition for its emphasis on the methods of ‘fieldwork’ and ‘observation’, with the modern meaning of the terms, in sociological research (MacAloon, 1981). Pierre de Coubertin related strongly to Frédéric Le Play because they both shared a desire to reform French education. Having the ambition to improve the use of recreation time and introduce sport in schools, colleges and universities in his native France, Coubertin visited English and Irish universities in 1883. He used Le Play’s method of observation and explored the qualities of English education in order to transfer them to France.2 In 1889 the French government sent him to the United States, where he observed the early programmes of intercollegiate athletics and was impressed by the excellent facilities that colleges and universities had made available to their students. His thoughts and ideas about those visits were expressed in his books Education en Angleterre and Universités Transatlantiques, as well as in numerous articles and presentations (Müller, 2000; Guttmann, 1992). The revival of the modern Olympic Games, officially conceived in 1894 at the first Olympic Congress, which was actually held at an educational institution, the Sorbonne University, should therefore be seen as a part and extension of Coubertin’s plans for an educational reform.
