Olympic Cavalcade

CHAPTER IV liNn OLYMPIC GAMES, PARIS, 19oo AT the conclusion of the Ist Games of the Modern Series held at Athens in 1896, Mons. Pierre de Coubertin had spoken of the next Olympic Games, which were to be bigger and better than the Athens revival. Thereafter de Coubertin, as President of the International O~ym_pic Committee, had a long interview with the Crown Prince of Greece. There was at that time a suggestion afoot that all future celebrations of the Games should be held at Athens in the Stadium, which, by the generosity of Mons. Averoff, had been re-created upon the site of the Ancient Games. In this connection the desire of the .Greeks was understandable and perfectly proper. All said and done, Olympia was the original and also the natural home for the Games. The Greeks had spent vast sums of money upon the instauration, they had produced a beautiful new marble Stadium on the site of the old, which had been excavated by German archaeologists, and the ancient Hymn to Apollo had also been rediscovered. There was, more– over, a natural sanctity about Olympia. There flourished the Altis, and there grew the olive trees from which the chaplets of the Olympic Victors were still culled, and Mt. Olympus was, moreover, the home of the Sacred Flame. De Coubertin, however, had studied his scheme and, during twenty-one years, had worked out a world-__wide and all-embracing policy. Back of it all was his intense desire to revive the old Greek Ideal and to establish the spirit and the definition of pure amateurism for all time. The Greeks were not unreasonable and the Crown Prince fully appreci– ated the strength of de Coubertin's arguments. Finally the two negotiators . hit upon the same idea. It was that a fresh series of Games, taking place at regular intervals between those of the original and official series, should be · arranged every four years in Athens. This will account for the intercalated series of Games held in 1906, which are described later in this book but are not reckoned officially in the enumerated series of Olympiads, but which celebration is usually tabulated in the lists of Olympic Results, since only the one celebration of the inter– calated series was ever held, and without keeping some record of it, the progressive improvement in the Games themselves would be lost. We must now, I think, take a look at the effect of the instauration of the Olympic Games upon sport generally throughout the world and upon athletics in particular. We have seen already how pedestrianism flourished in Britain before the cult of true amateurism was established. But sport was spreading, too, throughout the world and in America in particular. We are told that in the middle of the eighteenth century it was the custom of 28