As a child, I excelled in many of the team sports that are featured in the Olympic Games. But as a teenager, it was in the individual sports where I gave my best, where I felt like I was surpassing myself. I’m thinking here of the 100 metres and 800 metres on the track, among others.
When I was travelling from one competition to another in Quebec, by bus, with the members of the athletics club to which I belonged, I always had my nose in my poetry and philosophy books and I told myself quietly that I had to be faithful to the maxim that says “a healthy mind resides in a healthy body” and also, of course, to be faithful to the Olympic motto “faster, stronger, higher”. In fact, faster athletically, stronger intellectually and higher spiritually.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the visionary founder of the modern Olympic Games, saw in sport a philosophy of life. In addition to being an educator and historian, he was a poet. He wrote a poem and became an Olympic champion himself, at the 1912 Stockholm Games, winning a literature event (yes!) thanks to his poetic work. Ode to sport. An excerpt from this poem seems to me to be extremely relevant if we place it in the context of the Paris Games. Indeed, the City of Light is barricaded on all sides for security purposes. For fear, among other things, of possible attacks that could be perpetrated.
So de Coubertin wrote, 112 years ago: “O Sport, you are Peace! You establish happy relationships between peoples by bringing them together in the cult of controlled, organized and self-possessed force. Through you, universal youth learns to respect itself and thus the diversity of national qualities becomes the source of a generous and peaceful emulation.”
Let us hope that the Paris Olympic Games will take place in a spirit of peace and fraternity, in order to build on the legacy of Pierre de Coubertin.