Chatziefstathiou, Dikaia - 'All sport for all people': the socialist challenge, Coubertin and the ideology of popular olympism

摘要

Ever since its beginning at the 1894 Paris International Congress, the Olympic Movement has been challenged by the emerging historical, political circumstances and social conditions which have at certain times have even threatened its existence. In the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918), socialist and worker movements arose that organised their own sport events, their own ‘Olympiads’, as a form of resistance against the ‘bourgeois’, elitist and exclusionary Olympic Games. The present paper focuses on Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s ideas, motives and actions as expressed in his published articles and personal correspondence during the 1918-1931 period and examines his discursive strategies to attract popular interest in Olympic sport in order to safeguard the movement from the emerging external pressures. As evidenced in documents that were analysed, Coubertin’s new motto ‘all sport for all people’ constituted a new principle of the reconstructed, more democratic and inclusive model of ‘popular’ Olympism that aimed at countering the pressures generated in the political environment of the Olympic movement.