Pierre de Coubertin - Founder of the Modern Olympics

The more I research the Olympics, the athletes, and the people who have been associated with the Olympics over the last 120 years, the more fascinating it becomes!

As I mentioned in a previous post, this year I learned that there even was such a thing as the Paralympics, that there were countries that issued stamps commemorating the Paralympics, and that I even had a Paralympic stamp and Maxicard hiding in my collection and didn't even know it! I'll say more about that later in a post about the Paralympics.

But back to Pierre de Coubertin. One of the Olympic stamp sets I had was from Haiti, commemorating the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Two of the stamps had the picture of a man on them that I wanted to find out about.




So I began doing some digging on the internet and discovered it was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the man credited with founding the Modern Olympics in 1896!

I also discovered that beginning in 1935 lots of countries began issuing stamps commemorating his achievements in reviving the ancient Olympics and his contributions to the overall philosophy of the Olympic Movement. The more I read about and research Pierre de Coubertin the more fascinating he becomes.

As I began accumulating stamps honoring Coubertin Yvonne asked me, "Are you going to build a separate collection of stamps commemorating him?" My response was "I don't know, I might. But right now he is the opening chapter of my Olympics collection. The beginning of the story."

I was also eager to share my new pages, the stamps, and the stories I've gleaned from the internet, about this fascinating individual, with you. If you like stamps and stamp collecting, I hope you'll enjoy looking at the stamps and learning about the founder of the Modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

The picture above is called a "maxicard". It's like a postcard except with the stamp and the cancellation on the front. This one and the stamp on it were issued by France in 1956.

Pierre de Frédy was born in Paris on 1 January 1863 into an established aristocratic family. He was the fourth child of Baron Charles Louis de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin and Marie–Marcelle Gigault de Crisenoy. Family tradition held that the first recorded title of nobility granted to the family was given by Louis XI to an ancestor, also named Pierre de Frédy, in 1477. The annals of both sides of his family included nobles of various stations, military leaders, and associates of kings and princes of France.

In October 1874, his parents enrolled him in a new Jesuit school where, unlike many of the other students, Coubertin boarded at the school under the supervision of a Jesuit priest, which his parents hoped would instill him with a strong moral and religious education.

 As an aristocrat, Coubertin had a number of career paths from which to choose, including potentially prominent roles in the military or politics. But he chose instead to pursue a career as an intellectual, studying and later writing on a broad range of topics, including education, history, literature, and sociology.

The subject which he seemed to have been most deeply interested in was education, and his study focused in particular on physical education and the role of sport in schooling. In 1883, he visited England for the first time, and studied the program of physical education instituted by Thomas Arnold at the Rugby School.

As a historian and thinker on education, Coubertin romanticized ancient Greece. Thus, when he began to develop his theory of physical education, he naturally looked to the example set by the Athenian idea of the gymnasium, a training facility that simultaneously encouraged physical and intellectual development.

The Role of Art

Most of us can recall some distinct visual image or musical refrain from past Olympic Games. When we think of the Olympics we think of an oddly shaped sports stadium, a song announcing an award ceremony, or even colorful logos and flags that memorialize the Olympic Games for both athletes and spectators. These images give the Olympic Games a context that exists for few other sporting events. Pierre de Coubertin believed that sport was an aesthetic experience for athletes and spectators alike. He conceived of the modern Olympic Games as a spectacle that would demonstrate the harmony that existed between sport and art. He called this ideal “eurythmie”.

This set of stamps and souvenir sheets were issued by Mali in 1994 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the International Olympic Committee and the Modern Olympic Games by Pierre de Coubertin. Each set is an imperforated souvenir sheet, a regular perforated stamp, and an impeforated stamp.

Coubertin found support for his belief in the ancient Greek athletic festivals of Olympia. His theory described a modern sport that was a potent aesthetic experience for athletes and spectators, with sports and art inherently complementary. He wanted artists to contribute directly to the sporting spectacle of the Olympic Games.

The Olympic Games became distinguished as a modern spectacle where fine art and folk art merged aesthetically with a large international sport competition. Host cities sharing their distinctive cultural heritage with international visitors became part of the expanding Olympic Games celebrations.

The International Olympic Committee’s extensive stamp collection, housed at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, demonstrates that painters and engravers have been incorporating images of sport and Olympic symbolism into the production of postage stamps from the outset of the modern Olympic movement.

The two souvenir sheets below are still from the 1994 Mali set. The top one is perforted, while the bottom one is imprerforated.

In the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, at the artistic competition, the gold medal winning entry in the literature contest was a poem entitled ‘Ode to Sport’ written jointly by Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach, which extolled sport as a means toward Beauty, Justice, Daring, Honour, Joy, Fecundity, Progress and Peace. It was submitted in both French and German. The names of the poets, Hohrod and Eschbach, were in fact aliases used by Pierre de Coubertin himself. They were actually the names of two villages near the birthplace of his wife.

The block of stamps below and the selvage was from a sheet of stamps issued by the United States in 1996 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Modern Olympics by Pierre de Cubertin.