Live at the DMA: Pierre de Coubertin and the Modern Olympics

Coubertin had a vision to unite the world through sport, and he eventually managed to launch the modern Olympic Games. But those first few times out, things weren't always smooth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frod and I'm Tracy V. Wilson and we were lucky
enough to recently be invited by the Dallas Museum of
Art to participate in their late night's program for an

(00:23):
Olympic themed evening of fun and art. Was super exciting invitation,
it was, and it was really great, but it was
a little wacky. Yeah. We blew in on the day
of the event, and we had plenty of time factored
into this plan. But due to severe weather the Dallasport
where the airport got shut down and we couldn't land

(00:44):
and we had to be the religious report. Uh And
finally we took off again. We made it to the museum.
Are Amazing liaison at the d M A Jesse Frazier,
had switched up the schedule to basically postpone our talk
by two hours. Two hours, and much to our surprise,
Are Amazing listeners were still there. Yeah. I was perfectly ready,

(01:07):
and I mentioned it in the episode that you're about
to hear that I really thought everybody would leave, but
they didn't. They stuck around. They were amazing. It was
really humbling and really touching, and the evening turned out
to be incredibly fun, even if getting there had been
a crazy frantic dash. But this episode runs a little along,
So now, without further ado, we're just gonna intro it
and let it go. It is our chat with our

(01:29):
Dallas listeners about Pierre to Coubertin, considered the father of
the modern Olympics. And here we go. All right, buddy,
we are so happy to be here. Yeah, and so

(01:52):
happy you're here. Thank you for being so patient and
dealing with the weird time delay. Uh, it's been an
adventurous day of travel. Normally, yeah, Normally when we have
a last show, we start with some story about what
fascinating thing we saw in your city today. What we
saw today actually was Shreeveport I was unexpected, which we

(02:13):
didn't actually see because we had to stay on the
plane the whole time with the shutters down so that
it wouldn't get too hot. So that that was that
was how it started out. But now we're here and
we're delighted to be here. There are some dicey moments.
We did not know if we were going to make it,
so we're very elated to be here. Uh and again,

(02:36):
thank you guys for rolling with the crazy time change.
We really expected there to be like our six friends
that were invited and then like maybe two stragglers who
were just tired and needed a place to sit. So
it's wonderful to see all of you. Yes, are you
ready to talk about the Olympics? How many? How many
of you guys have been watching the Olympics because Tracy

(02:58):
does not have the rabies like I have, but I
have Olympic rabies, Like I telework a lot. In the
last two weeks, I've been teleworking, so I can just
watch it all day long, and I have it going
on the television and then another one on a monitor
so I can get a secondary feed because I have
Olympic rabies. Um, so it's it's exciting. So it's very
exciting for me to get to talk about sort of

(03:19):
where the modern Olympics started and some of the really
wild ride it went on for a while before it
kind of smoothed out. Do you want to talk about
that for a bit? Yeah? Okay, So I'm gonna be
a jerk and take off my glasses because my vision
is poor and I can't read my page and look
at you at the same time. I know I need
bifocals probably, and I already got the lecture. It's fine.

(03:40):
This is literally what we were talking about backstage. It is,
it is, it is so tonight we are going to
talk about the man who reignited the world's interest in
the Olympics and really catalyzed the launch of the modern Games.
And we're also going to talk, as Jesse mentioned about uh,
several of the early games and how a rather rocky
start eventually led to the games becoming what we know

(04:01):
them of today, what we know of them today, and
how obsessively people like me watch them. Also, we never
did our Hello and welcome to the podcast. You want
to do that part now, sure, and then I'll do
this other paragraph and then we'll smooth it right out.
We're just like the Olympics. I thought you were gonna say,
we're just like at home. Well, no, we're already way
smoother than that, because we have a wonderful editor, Tracy

(04:24):
and I. Sometimes there are a little sloppy, geloppy in
the studio. We can be, especially because you record early
in the morning and we often have been up kind
of late making sure all our notes were together, and
sometimes it's not good. We're very like kind of like
I need more coffee. I can't, but we'll start like
it's a regular podcast. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Froy and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Sometimes sometimes

(04:53):
don't you want to just switch to confuse people. There
have been times I've almost just said your name for
I'm not I've not ever been quite sure why I
almost said your name, but that's happened more than one.
I have almost said I'm Holly V. Fry, which is
not my middle initial, but it's hers. Well. And when
we had that previous podcast, pop Stuff, we would say
weird things. Yeah, we were a little nutier. Yeah, maybe

(05:17):
one day that was a little more casual than our
current podcast. So while Pierre de Coubertin, who is the
father of the modern Olympics, is characterized in a lot
of different ways, including sometimes a fool, sometimes a sexist,
pretty accurate um and a visionary regardless of the lens
that you used to look at his life, he really
did leave an indelible mark on history as the father

(05:38):
of the modern Olympic games. It's true and Pierre de
Freddie was born a baby New Year. He was born
in Paris, France, on New Year's Day of eighteen sixty three.
He was the fourth and final child of a very
aristocratic family and his father. Now here's the part where
if we were in the studio, I'd probably get to

(05:59):
do it full times. I was gonna act like I
can speak French really well today Chile de Freddy, baron
Dick kubour Fin and he was a painter. His mother
was Marie marcel Jo Decres Nooy. I didn't do that
one very well. Uh. And the family traveled a lot

(06:20):
throughout Europe, and when they weren't on the road, they
could often be found at his mother's family's chateau, which
was in Normandy. Don't you just wish your family had
a chateau in Normandy? Uh? And Pierre attended school primarily
in Paris at the Jesuit College of Saint Ignatius, and
he earned a degree in literature actually, and he next
continued his education at the law faculty of the Political Sciences,

(06:42):
which was pretty common for aristocratic young men. They would
kind of go military, which he was offered a military
career and turned it down and decided he would go
to college. Uh, but instead he decided to pursue his
his law education. It did not stick, no, because he
didn't really find his calling until he became interested in education,

(07:02):
and his dedication to the field of education grew steadily
until eighteen eighty three, and at that point he was
twenty and so what he decided to do was to
go to England to compare the educational systems of England
and France. And he was convinced after the study of
the two approaches to education that the key to a
really balanced and thorough education was the inclusion of sports

(07:25):
in school curriculums. So all of you who growned your
way through Pe, thanks Pierre and his personal mission really
became one of educational reform overall, but sports was really
the focus of his agenda pretty much throughout. One of
the things that he did a whole lot of was

(07:46):
start groups. He liked to start groups. He started a
lot of groups. He established the Union dis Society Francai
Dick Clarsapiec, which was the Union of French running groups
and that was seven. Yeah, we'll pop in periodically with
some of the groups that he started because he was
a busy bee, uh, and he had some really really
big goals in mind for sports. So he pretty early

(08:08):
on decided it would be super cool if we re
established the Olympic Games, and so he worked really diligently
towards that, starting at the end of the eighteen eighties,
and that year at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, he
started an assembly series where basically he was bringing people
together so that he could promote the importance of sport
and physical education in groups very much like what we

(08:28):
have here today. So in and one of these gatherings
that he had started, he launched a plan to revive
the Olympics, which at that point was much smaller deal,
not an international giganto thing like it is now. And
he spoke to this group and he talked about the
virtues of sport is a great way to achieve anymore,

(08:51):
even more than the technology of the day could achieve.
And his thing that he said was, quote, let us
export rowers, runners and fencers. There is the free trade
of the future. And on the day it is introduced
within the walls of old Europe, the cause of peace
will have received a new and mighty stay. He was
real excited. Uh, and his enthusiastic idea really did meant

(09:17):
was met with enthusiastic response but ultimately failure. Uh. He
was undeterred. He still thought this was a good idea
and where he was going to keep going. And we
should also mention Tracy kind of alluded to it that
there were events happening that people were calling the Olympics
that were modeled on the historical Olympics of ancient times,
but they were like local It would be like the

(09:38):
city Olympics or even the country Olympics in some case,
but nothing where we were going to have multiple countries
coming together to compete. That was sorry, considered insanely ambitious.
I mean, that's why people were like, the great idea
not gonna happen. There was though, some interest in the
idea of the Olympics, and that was in part few

(10:00):
by archaeological excavations that were happening at the site of
ancient Olympia, and so there was this whole deal for
antiquity that became a driving force and adopting this whole
Olympic Games idea. In a report on the first Modern
Games that was written quote, we shall then before long
enter on the twentieth century crowned with the fair flowers

(10:22):
of ancient civilization. That's very poetic. Its poetic, uh and
Kobot taking advantage of this fascination with Olympia's history that
was part of the culture of later nineteenth century because
if you've studied like Victorian culture at all, you know,
they got really obsessed with like these weird little pockets
of other cultures and they would kind of blow them
out in completely inappropriate and you know, lack of understanding typeways.

(10:45):
But they got very obsessed. So he thought he was
going to trade on that, and he arranged for yet
another big gathering and this assembly, which was the International
Athletics Congress in was horse hosted at the sore Bun
in Paris, and unlike the A T nine Congress, this
group resolved to follow through on Kubertin's idea. They were
in in in and so this eventually led to the

(11:07):
creation of a body that we still have today, which
is the International Olympic Committee, and the revival ultimately of
the Olympic Games. And this is also when some of
the basic guidelines around participation were created, including like amateur
athletes had to compete and when there could and could
not be prizes. So in the middle of all this
starting groups and wanting to relaunch the Olympics, we should

(11:30):
also point out that Pierre de Coubertin also had a
personal life. He was doing other things too. On March
twelve of eighteen nine, he married Marie role Fat and
they had their first child, named Jacques a year later
in eighteen ninety six, And of course, also in eighteen
ninety six, the first modern Olympic Games took place in Athens, Greece,
So that was a very big year for Pierre. So

(11:52):
while he is called the father of the modern Olympics,
those first modern games definitely would not happen without the
involvement of an another man, Georgios Averoff. Money had been
a serious problem for the Olympic plan from the beginning.
This may sound familiar to people who are familiar with
the current Olympic Games. Initially, the city of Athens was

(12:15):
reluctant to host it because Greece was insolvent. That may
also sound familiar. Uh, the cities didn't have the money
to do it, and there was no infrastructure to support
it either. Yeah, but people really wanted to go back
to the site of the ancient Olympics. To kick this
thing off. So Averoff, who was an Alexandrian man with
great private wealth from shipping, banking, real estate. He just

(12:39):
was a really good businessman, had his hands and a
lot of stuff that was making a great deal of money,
and he financed the restoration of the stadium that was
used for the Olympics. And this structure had originally been
built in three thirty b C. So it was extremely
ancient and it had only been excavated a few decades
prior to this, so it needed a lot of work.
It required so much need to restore, but Averroff was willing,

(13:02):
and in doing so, he not only injected funding into
the project, but he also catalyzed additional sponsorships from other
wealthy patrons, ultimately making the games possible. So it just
took one rich guy to get the other rich guys interested.
It was kind of a quirky thing though the stadium.
For example, the track was a lot longer and narrower

(13:23):
than a regulation tracks, so the runners had to like
change their speed when they went around the curves because
the curves were really tight. It was regulation in ancient times,
not today. Uh and as an aside, the winter weather
that happened prior to the Games prevented the completion of
that stadium quite as designed. So initially all of the

(13:44):
stadium and the seating was supposed to be restored with
pentelic marble. This is beautiful white marble. But construction was
only completed for the seating portion. The rest was done,
but the seating just the first six rows were done,
so they had to kind of quickly shuffle in some
wooden seating to fill out the rest to it. Uh.
But ever Off, true to his word, did provide additional
funding after the Olympics had wrapped up so that they

(14:06):
could in fact restore the entire facility. I just want
to say, restored stadium, stadium with marble seats sounds really
beautiful and really uncomfortable. Uh So though first Summer Games,
they were only for men, no women competing. Uh. They
began on April sixth of EE and that was Easter

(14:29):
Monday and they ran until April fifteen. About sixty thousand
spectators were there the first day and there were two
one athletes from fourteen different countries who traveled to Athens
to participate. Even though it was really hot and sunny.
Parasols were not allowed because that might block the view
for everybody else. Ladies to carry fans, but no parasols.

(14:51):
And the Greek royal family was on hand that afternoon
and they addressed the crowd. There wasn't really an opening
ceremony the way we know it now. That didn't happen
until later, but they were there and kind of kicked
everything off, and they did have a hymn that was
kind of their opening ceremonies that was written specially for
the occasion, and it was sung by a choir of
a hundred and fifty vocalists and by all accounts, was
just a lovely, lovely thing. So we're used to seeing

(15:14):
seeing really inspiring human stories in televised Olympic coverage. Those
stories are actually what made people want to watch the
Olympics on television. Like the Olympics were not popular on
TV until they started showing the story of like the
underdog athlete who became this wonderful star. But there have
always been amazing people with unique stories behind the participation

(15:36):
in the games, even before there were TV networks deciding, oh,
this would be a great way to get people to watch. Uh,
and so in a little bit we're going to talk
about them. Yeah, but first we're gonna pause for a
word from one of our sponsors. So one of those, uh,
sort of personal interest stories that we talked about involves

(15:58):
Hungarian swimmer Alfred High and he was an architecture student
who had made a conscious decision to become good at
swimming when he was just a boy because he watched
his father drown in the Danube when he was thirteen,
which is kind of a horrifying impetus to do something
really well. But it worked. Uh, he got really good

(16:19):
at it. And his architecture school was not super enthused
that he was gonna hop away and go do this
weird Olympics thing. Uh. They didn't want to give him
the time to compete, even though he was already a
decorated competitive swimmer. It wasn't like a guy who went, hey, teach,
can I have the week off because I would like
to go swim. It was like, no, you remember when
I won all of those awards, I would like to

(16:39):
go win more awards and they're like school work. Um,
But he went to the Games anyway. He also won
the gold in two events, the one and the twelve freestyle.
So the way the twelve hundred meter freestyle worked was
it took all the people out in a boat twelve
hundred meters away and they were like, they were like,

(17:01):
you gotta swim to shore. Uh. And and then he
said that the driving force behind this achievement was actually fear.
And his quote was my will to live completely overcame
my desire to win. But he wanted to live more

(17:24):
than all the other swimmers, apparently because he whipped them soundly.
Hiosh did go on to finish his architecture degree after
the Games, and the kind of I think a lovely twist.
He went and went on to design sports stadiums and
swimming facilities, many of which are still in use today.
So he was good at swimming. F'm good at architecture. Uh.

(17:45):
And then the next sort of inspiring people will talk
about where marksmen. They were two American brothers, John and
Sumner Payne. Uh. And they were like a big story
that year in the Olympics because for one thing, they
didn't really have any training involved in their participation. Really,
they were just they could shoot things. It's a little wimy. Uh.
So John was going to Athens for the game. He

(18:05):
stopped in France where his brother lived, and was like, Hey,
do you want to come from compete in these revolver
matches with me? And his brother said sure, And the
Boston Athletic Association was already sending a team and both
of the men were already members, so that worked out. Yeah,
so he was kind of grandfathered in by virtue of
being in that athletic group. And the pair got to
Athens and they had no idea what to expect and

(18:27):
what to pack, so they basically brought a crazy arsenal.
This wouldn't work today. No. Uh. They had a lot
of different revolvers, they had a lot of different HMO
because they didn't know what they'd need. And they got
there literally the night before the competition began. So even
though they had no prep time, though, they dominated the
first event, which was the twenty five Military Revolver contest,

(18:49):
and John easily took the gold. Sumner came in seconds
and John's score was more than double that of the
third place shooter. It was like Sumner Brother, Sumner Brother, Hey,
you guys, like they were just not Nobody could come
anywhere close to them. So the next day, John set
out because they had agreed between the two of them
that whoever won the first day would not play the

(19:10):
second day. We should point out this may explain why
they weren't doing gold, silver, bronze. It was like you
win or you're the rest of the dudes there was,
so it wasn't quite as fancy to be seconds. So
Sumner at this time took the gold in the thirty
meter competition, once again, way way beyond all of the
other scores. They had arrived at the game the games

(19:33):
with rounds of ammunition, which like that seems like a
lot again for revolvers, but I'm not sure how they
thought this game was gonna work. Uh, they only fired
ninety six shots, though I don't know what they did
with the rest of the ammo. I know, I nobody

(19:55):
ever tells you if they just were like, okay, let's
trundle all of this back to the stage out. Although
I get home and started shooting a lot of it,
just had to go to France to Sumner's house, I
guess so. Uh. The last athlete from those first Olympic
Games that we're going to talk about is Carl Schumann,
and he was twenty six when he competed, and the
feats that he pulled off were astonishing, because I mean

(20:18):
we those of you that raised your hands when you
said you watched the Olympics, I'm sure you sit there
like me, going, oh my gosh, these are superheroes. This
is not human possibly, oh my god, you lose your
mind and you just go insane. So imagine doing that
for somebody that goes I'm gonna do a few different sports.
You guys did last sports Carl Schumann, not just one,
any sports Carl Carl Schumann. Did we say that he

(20:40):
was twenty six? Who did? Okay? I wasn't paying attention. Uh.
Schumann won the gold in several different gymnastics events. You
got team gold and horizontal bar and parallel bars, and
an individual gold in the vault. So that is already
that's a lot of gold. And but then he also
competed in greco room and wrestling and he may did
it to the gold medal match and that about lasted

(21:03):
on the first day for forty minutes. Uh. But then
they had to pause because the sun was going down,
and so they started up again the next morning. Uh,
And he ultimately won after fifteen additional minutes that were
played out after everyone had gone to bed and woken
up again. As I was working on the research for this,

(21:29):
in my head, it was very much like when your
kids and you have to go home because it's dark out,
except then you have to come back and compete at
an international athletic level. Um, that's not how I worked
in your neighborhood as a kid. Uh so Suman also
competed in weightlifting and track and field events, including the
long jump and the shot put, although he did not
place in those events. And at a time when the

(21:51):
city was really riding high on the fact that a
hometown hero named uh spirit On Lewis had won the marathon,
that was like a big deal. Uh in Greece was
pretty much going bananas over him. The King of Greece
actually turned to Schumann and said, I think you're the
most popular man in Greece now, because he had just
blown everybody away by being this incredible multi sport athlete.

(22:14):
So after the Games and their great success, Kuberton became
the International Olympic Committee President and that he replaced Demetrius
vick Halis, and this would be a job that he
would then have for a really long time. He remained
the IOC president until nineteen twenty five, which was twenty
nine years after he first took the job, and then

(22:37):
he was named honorary president for life. And the first
Games that were staged under Kupetan's leadership as IOC president,
they did not go well at all. They were in
Paris in and we have to say that Kupeptin can't
really be shackled with all of the shame in this

(22:57):
because the games were kind of lumped together with the
nine Paris Exposition. So control of the Olympics was pretty
much taken over by the French government and they saw
the Olympics as a secondary event to the World's Fair.
So the Olympic planning really did not get enough attention
or focused by the by the government committees. So there's

(23:19):
an episode in our archive by previous hosts that is
specifically about these games and what a debacle they were.
So we're just going to hit a few of the
highlights of the misery and confusion of the Olympic Games. Uh,
We'll start with the fact that the committee that was
doing the advertising and the promotion tended to like give
out this information as being part of the expo programming,

(23:40):
so a lot of the athletes didn't even know that
they were at the Olympics and that they were part
of a completely different sporting event. And despite the fact
that they may not have known what they were there for,
there were far more athletes uh at the French Games
than there had been at the previous Games that were
so successful in Athens. There were this time nine seven

(24:02):
participants from twenty four countries. Although France by far had
the most competitors involved in the games, also had the
first black Olympic competitor, Constantine Enrique de Zubierira I think,
who participated on the French rugby team. So because these
games were in conjunction with the Expo, they dragged on

(24:22):
and on and on. They opened on May the fourteenth
and they wrapped up on October. I have a friend
who's super end of the Olympics, like to the point
that he says on Facebook, you just want to follow
me for the next two weeks, and it's like it's

(24:43):
like minutely, it's almost like he's live tweeting the Olympics
on its Facebook um and I don't I think his
fingers would have fallen off. If the Olympics now are
going from May fourteenth until act just walked around like
this for long, you would have finger creent. So the
scheduling of the events was so poorly handled and the

(25:04):
information was so poorly shared that a lot of them
just like they happened with no journalists to cover them
and no spectators either. Yeah. I think it was a
croquet match where one person showed up and was like,
am I even in the right place? I don't, I'm
not from your country. Um. And the venues were entirely subpar,

(25:24):
so they did not have a fabulously wealthy investor to
complete beautiful venues. Um. One of these things that was happening.
The track and field events were being held on like
really slippery, uneven ground, so I can imagine how beautifully
that went off. UM. And swimming was taking place in
the sin and the currents were causing swimmers to have

(25:47):
some really fast times. It was just kind of throwing
them down the river. Basically it was even faster than
the Rio pool apparently. So a lot of new events
were added that year, and some of them have continued on.
There was archery, rowing, and football that means soccer, uh,

(26:08):
and then there were also events that that year, like
croquetine golf that didn't become standard parts of the Olympic programs,
but golf did come back in so maybe we'll stick around.
And I'm going to confess I didn't follow it. I
don't know what happened or if it's still happening. Golf
was not my thing. Uh. And though the IOC did
not officially recognize women's events, twenty two women did participate

(26:31):
in the Nine Games. You'll often hear about Great Britain's
Charlotte Cooper as being the first woman to win a
gold medal in the modern Olympics. She won for tennis,
but there was actually another woman, Ein de Proper of Switzerland,
who had competed on a yawning team and that one
gold a couple of months prior to Cooper's victory, so
she didn't win an individual but she is technically really

(26:53):
the first woman that ever won a gold. There was
also an American woman, Margaret Abbott, who won a golden golf. However,
she was one of the people who did not know
that she was at that moment competing in the Olympics. Uh.
And then Holly and I had a conversation on the
plane about she may not have even known that in
her life. In her life. Uh, it's unclear whether whether

(27:15):
this was something that people put the pieces together after
she died or not. But regardless, all of this confusion
was due to just terrible record keeping and bad bad communication.
Throughout the five month run of the Olympic Games. Uh.
There were also some interesting things going on where in
team events, and some of those included polo, sailing and

(27:37):
tennis where the participants weren't even all from the same
country because they couldn't kind of get it all together
in one country and also they didn't know it was
the Olympics. So uh. This includes the Dutch two man
rowing team, which one gold and this is sort of fascinating.
It's one that Sarah Dablina talked about in their episodes
specifically about this. But at the last moment, the cocks

(27:58):
in on the Dutch team had to be replaced, and
the person that replaced them was like a young French boy,
like a young French boy like seven to thirteen is
where his age is guessed, and they won gold and
he was in the pictures and then he vanished and
no one has any idea who he ever was, So
he's sometimes referred to as like the lost Olympian or

(28:19):
the missing Olympian. And I just wonder if there was
just a kid wandering around France trying to tell people
he had won an Olympic gold medal, of people like
happy shop. Uh, so, obviously this was a mess. It
was so much of a mess that there was some
debate as to whether the nineteen hundred Games could even
be considered real Olympics. The French, though, did walk away

(28:41):
with a hundred medals, which made the governmental organizers really
happy about their involvement. Kumartan, though, was not really thrilled,
and he really hoped that one day France would be
able to redeem itself as an Olympic host. And next up,
we're going to talk about the nineteen o four Games,
which saw history repeating itself almost immediately. But first we're

(29:01):
gonna pause for a sponsor break. We'll hop back in
and talk about the ninety four Games, which took place
in St. Louis. And uh, you know, you might think
that after that whole problem of running an Olympic Games

(29:23):
alongside an international exposition had been so evident, that we
would never do it again, except we did it again.
The next time. They did the exact same thing. It's
after working on this podcast for three years that just
seems to happen a lot in history. Like that didn't work.
So the nine four Olympics were initially announced as a Chicago,

(29:47):
Illinois events, but then the organizers realized they were going
to be competing with the World's Fair in St. Louis, UH,
and that the city of St. Louis had already arranged
to have the Amateur Athletic Union's Track and Field to
Mpionships there at the same time. So basically there were
conflicts in the calendar. So the decision was made to
once again loop the Olympics and the Expo together, and

(30:09):
all of the exact same problems that had happened the
previous time happened again. Yes, so once again because they
wanted to run it kind of over the course of
the expo. It went on for months and months and months.
I think that one was like April two October, but
it was very similar, like a four and a half
five months situation. Only twelve countries participated this time because

(30:30):
Paris had been such a train wreck. UH, and of
the six hundred and thirty athletes who did choose to compete,
three percent of those were from the US. So internationally
people were like, noop, uh, it was definitely not you know,
the beautiful international people coming together event that Coo brook
Down always envisioned for the Olympic Games. He also didn't

(30:51):
envision a lot of cheating problem, but we had that
in There was a boxer who entered the Games under
the assumed name of a popular or local person from St. Louis,
hoping that the judges would be more generous with his
points and would not recognize this very obvious fraud. They
did eventually, but it took a shockingly long time. UM.

(31:12):
And then the marathon winner, uh Fred Laure's had actually
become ill on the course while he was running, and
he dropped out of the event and got picked up
by like an assistance vehicle, and then when that car
was carrying back carrying him back to the stadium, it
broke down and he was like, well, I feel better,
so he just jumped back in. So he rejoined the

(31:36):
race and he crossed the line first UM, and they
eventually people realized someone had seen him do this, and
so later to avoid a lifetime ban from the sport,
because of course everybody was up in arms about it.
He claimed that he had experienced temporary insanity during the race.

(31:56):
This is where I go. Really, I was crazy. I
think what I was doing really so after this nineteen
for uh the word that I was gonna say is
not appropriate for family audience. Uh. So I'm just gonna
stay debacle. Uh, Coubertan wrote, quote, I had a sort
of presentment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of

(32:19):
the town. He didn't. He wasn't a big fan of St. Louis.
Remember he was fancy and French. So you know, I'm
glad we're not doing the show in St. Louis because
that might have been really offensive, would have been bad.
What was cooper up town? We didn't say that about St. Louis. Uh.
And while the baron the Cup up prepared for the
next games, which were going to be held in Rome,

(32:40):
he also busied himself in some other ways. Remember how
we talked about how he'd like to start groups and
do stuff. He'd never ever lost his passion for education.
So even while he was kind of spearheading all of
these Olympic events. He was also still trying to do
some some good and some revision and reform in the
education sphere, and so in nineteen o six he found SEMENT,

(33:03):
also known as the Association for Teaching Reform. So Holly
just said that the next Olympics were going to be
in Rome. But that is now what happened. Uh in
nine six, the Italian organizers were already way way behind schedule,
and then on top of their being behind schedule, Vesuvius
erupted UH and it was immediately obvious that Rome was

(33:25):
not going to be ready for Olympics and time to
actually have them there. So Italy needed to also reallocate
all of the funds that we're supposed to go to
pay for the games to instead pay for a volcano cleanup.
So they decided to UH move them elsewhere, and London
offered to hope to host the games with only two
years to get ready for it. And that sounds like

(33:45):
we're leading to another disaster story. Those British got their
act together, though, man they didn't. These were incredibly incredibly
well organized games under the leadership of British Olympic Association
chairman Lord Desbro. They were. It really considered to be
just pretty amazing in terms of how well run they were.
The venues had been built specifically for the games through

(34:07):
an interesting deal he worked where the Franco British Exhibition
of nineteen o eight actually footed the bill to build
all of these buildings in exchange for getting part of
the ticket sales back. So that was one of the
ways that London kind of worked this whole deal financially.
And there was for the first time ever a pool
built for swimming events, so they didn't have to throw
guys down the river or take them by boat way

(34:28):
far away and tell them to just get back onto
shore somehow swim back and gone drown. H two thousand
and eight athletes from twenty two different countries participated in
these Games, which once again went from April all the
way to October, so we hadn't quite worked that part
out yet. However, women were finally allowed to officially compete

(34:50):
in the Games, although Cooper Town was not a fan
of letting him do this. He called women's athletics quote
the most unesthetic site human eyes could co to play. Thanks,
what a charmer. But then when I think he said
in a French accent. I'm like, Okay, I don't agree,

(35:12):
but it's still cute. Also, we did not mention and
I didn't put it in these notes. Go look up
Pierre the Kubel on the internet. The most spectacular mustache
you have ever seen on the planet. He had a
pretty spectacular, pretty mustache of wonderful, slightly goofy. Yeah. When
we were settling on what topic to do for our
live show here, you kept sending me pictures. I'm like, like,

(35:36):
this will make you want to do this one and
I was like, sure, that's I just gave her up.
It was like death by a thousand cups of mustache pictures. Uh.
And while this was really where the games as we
see them started to develop and take shape, there was
definitely drama as well as some very interesting developments. So
we'll take off a few of those. The first one

(35:57):
is that the marathon finally got its now standard point
two mile distance at these games. So prior to that
the distance had varied. And one of the reasons that
this distance happened at these games is that that last
hundred and ninets needed to be added so they would
finish under the Royal box. Because the Royal people had

(36:20):
to see it. They had to see the big finish. Uh.
The winner of that marathon, he was an Italian named
Dorondo Pietri. Collapsed on the track before the finish and
was helped to the end, which is a very Olympic story,
but his victory was disqualified because of the part where
someone helped him. Maybe that's not as Olympic in its story, nous.

(36:45):
But an American named Johnny Hayes caught after all of
that was a person declared the winner, and we should
point out it wasn't another athlete that stopped and helped him.
It was it was like people that were just people
who were around. I think it was Olympic officials that
kind of were like, oh, come on, you can finish.
He did get sort of a I don't remember what
exactly they gave him. They gave him kind of a

(37:05):
consolation prize for having great Olympic spirit and you know,
working so hard, like they didn't want to just go joint.
We took your prize away and gave it to this
other guy. Um. That was also the first year that
the parade of athletes behind their national flag started. But
there were some protests that happened in it. So, first
the United States refused to dip their flag in honor

(37:27):
of Britain's King Edward the seventh. We fought a war
and not have to do that, right, And that's one
of those things that it kept coming up. I saw
that referenced in several different places, and every time it
would kind of coda with a tradition that continues today.
So like they just kind of I always assume that
some British person writing Americans are still jerks. Um. Russian

(37:50):
rule in Finland was being protested by the Finnish athletes,
so they refused to carry a flag because it represented that. Uh.
And Irish athletes refused to participate under the flag of
Great Britain and most of them ended up not competing
at all because of It's I can't believe there was
this much drama about flags. Do you have a flag? Uh?

(38:12):
So the awarding of medals had not been uniform in
previous Olympics. Um. The London Games awarded medals to all winners. Yeah,
and some of the Olympics prior to that, sometimes they
would get medals and then like and I don't mean like, oh,
in this Olympics, they got medals, and in this in
the same Olympics, some people would get medals and others

(38:32):
would get like a certificate. Um. You can imagine how
I rpe making that would be. Uh. And in the
four final, American runner J. C. Carpenter in these Olympics
was found to have obstructed British competitor Wyndham Hallswell. So
the race results were completely thrown out and the solution
was that they were going to have a do over. Um.

(38:54):
But the Americans were very crabby about the whole thing
and refused to participate, and in the end Hallswell was
the only one and he ran the race alone. Uh
so he automatically won the gold. Did he did he
try hired when he ran or was he just like
I'm doing it now? You know? I think I think
he put fourth effort. He felt a little cheated by

(39:17):
having been obstructed the first time around. Sure. So it
was decided at the Games that future Games would include
competitions in the arts, specifically literature, architecture and sculpture, which
was actually another contender for the topic of Our Lives
show is one of the things we talked about. Maybe
talking about those awards were part of the Games from
nineteen twelve to night. And now we're going to jump

(39:41):
to a really good one because in nineteen twelve the
next one, the fifth Olympiad. This took place in Stockholm,
and this is when the modern Olympic Games really really
hit their stride. Like they were good. They ran from
May to July, so not the four to five months
big extended festival. They were attended by two thousand, four
hundred seven athletes from twenty eight countries, including forty eight women,

(40:04):
participating in an ever expanding field of events. Sorry, he
would hate the Olympics. Now, yeah, maybe he would hate
some of the Olympics. Yeah. The games were so efficient
and so well run that they were nicknamed the Swedish Masterpiece.
Photo finish and automatic timing made their way their Olympic

(40:28):
debus this year, and they really legitimize the competition in
the whole a whole new way because now you had
like very precise ways of telling who would it just
you know, added a little science to the mix. Uh.
And while the Stockholm Games went off just about perfectly,
there was one small issue in that the boxing competition

(40:48):
was canceled because the Swedish organizers found it distasteful UM,
and this led to the IOC eventually restricting the responsibilities
that local host groups had over making decisions like that
so that they wouldn't be able to make changes in
the program. Kind of late in the game, but just
the same. Finally everyone could agree that in Sweden the

(41:11):
modern Olympics had arrived. So now we're going to get
into Pierre to cub Suddenly, I can't say his name.
We're now we're going to get into Pierre to cupboard
ten's final years. I still didn't say it right, Okay,
my mouth has stopped working. As we mentioned earlier, he
served as president for another thirteen years. Once the Paris
Games of nineteen twenty four had wrapped up, he was

(41:33):
basically ready to retire. The nineteen twenty four event had
been in success that had drawn record numbers of attendees
and athletes and participating countries and journalists to cover all
of it, so basically Paris had been redeemed from this
nineteen hundred debacle, and the same year as his retirement,
which was the year after that, nive Um as active

(41:54):
duty president, he also founded the Olympic Museum and Library,
and this includes his extend ends of writing and records,
because throughout all of this, every time he had made
a speech from the eighteen eighties on, he made notes.
He kept it every meeting that he had, every piece
of notation he made about the Olympics in each year
that they were happening, in all of the planning. He

(42:14):
had been writing about it prolifically the whole time. So
that sort of formed the basis for this museum and
library and all of his correspondence that was used as
part of this, you know, move to really reignite the
the Olympic flame throughout the world. He continued his educational
work during this time too. He established I can't you

(42:37):
can just do the English. I was saying in English.
It's getting late now the Universal Pedagogical Union, and that
was in nineteen five. Then in ninety eight he insisted,
he insists, that's not what it says. That I swear,
this is not vodka. I also I even printed my
notes really big so that I would be sure to

(42:58):
be able to read them on the stage. And yet
I'm having trouble now it's late. Uh. In ninety eight
he instituted the International Sports Education Office, so he was
still doing a whole lot of group group forming regulating
to sports and athletics, and then in nineteen thirty six,
so a little bit later, it was kind of a
mixed year for k He was a candidate for the

(43:20):
Nobel Peace Prize that year because of all of his
work in the Olympic Games, but he did not win.
The prize that year was awarded to Argentine politician and
academic Carlos sa Lamas, who was the first Latin American
recipient of the Nobel Prize. So pretty exciting for him,
not so much for kuber Fan. He did win another
award in nineteen thirty six, however, that was the Virginny

(43:41):
Harold Prize, named for a famed French olympian and yachts
woman from the nineteen twenties. Yeah, she was kind of
if you listen to the show, she was kind of
running in the same circles as Joe Carstairs, one of
my big favorites of her. Um. But the nineteen thirty
six Olympics, despite him having this interesting year in terms
of awards and recognition, were incredibly stressful for Kup because

(44:05):
when the IOC had selected Berlin as the location for
the thirty six Olympics. It was nineteen thirty one, and
it was two years after that that Hitler became the
Chancellor of Germany and everything changed um and in that
moment when they had awarded it to Germany in thirty one,
it was sort of this great indicator that the strife

(44:26):
of World War One was being put aside and Germany
was once again sort of being welcomed into the global
village and everyone was going to be cool. But that,
of course is not how I played out, No, because he,
as we said, became the Chancellor of Germany two years later,
and so by the end of nineteen thirty three, German
sports organizations had instituted a policy that only Arians could

(44:48):
participate in athletic clubs, and as a consequence of the
anti semitism and racism that were in place in Germany,
a lot of countries started a boycott movement against the
nineteen thirty six Games. Is another game the past hosts
have talked about specifically on the show uh and included
in part of the movements of boycott where the United States,

(45:08):
Great Britain, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia. But eventually
that boycott crumbled, it did not hold, and forty nine
nations did participate in the games, and Pierre de Coubertin
had been invited, but he declined he wanted nothing to
do with it, and the games really turned into a
big propaganda play for Hitler's Germany and later came to

(45:28):
be known as the Nazi Games. Uh. This is, however,
also the Games where American Jesse Owens famously won four
gold medals. So the Nazi Games, but with a little
nice stab from the US. After the Olympics concluded in Berlin,
Kubertin was described by his friends as being the sort
of state of melancholy. The troubles surrounding Germany as a

(45:50):
host of the Games were one cause, but he was
also really dealing with serious financial issues. Yeah, Pierre was
deeply troubled at the thought of all his life's work
falling apart because of a lack of money, Like he
had really put a lot of his own money in
addition to his own time in kind of getting all
of this stuff off the ground. And uh. In August
of ninety seven, he wrote in a letter to a

(46:12):
close friend, quote, these adverse circumstances have created an agonizing situation.
The loss of my personal fortune threatens my lifelong effort
at enlightening pedagogical progress. Also in nineteen thirties seven, he
was honored by the city of las Ange, Switzerland. Is
that how you say that? Okay good as an honorary

(46:33):
citizen and this isn't the Suddenly my mind just went,
what do you want me to read? Uh? And uh?
This is uh. The la Fan became home to the
International Olympic Committee in nineteen fifteen, so that's why they
named him an honorary citizen. And while colleagues from the

(46:53):
International Olympic Committee as well as many of his friends
were trying to brainstorm ways that they might help Kuber
to find actually that discussion quickly, unfortunately became moot because
not long after the Lausanne celebration, on September two seven,
he had a heart attack while he was walking in
a park in Geneva and he died. So his body

(47:14):
was laid to rest there in las Ane, but at
the blood of a cemetery, but his heart was interred
adjacent to the ruins of ancient Olympia, Greece with a
commemoration of the revival of the Olympic Games, and that
was done seven months after he died, and was done
to honor and fulfill his wishes, which I feel like
is important because that would be a weird symbolism to

(47:36):
do without someone's I don't know if anybody would have
been down with somebody going, you know what he should
do is put his heart in Olympia. His ghost was
like we we so, except that didn't happen because he
was like, please do this, uh so let us And

(47:56):
to end, we're gonna talk about kind of a thing
that inspired him um to create sort of the creed
of the Olympic Games. And that's the During the London Games,
Pierre was inspired by the words of the Bishop of
Bethlehem who is Ethelbert Talbot, and that bishop was addressing
a group of athletes and officials and he was conveying
this really important message that winning was not to be

(48:18):
gained at all costs. And the IOC president Piot after
that crafted this sentiment into the following phrase, which has
become the Olympic creed, and that is lampoon don la
vis and epoix le clo may look on backs made
a set club gain bat So the important thing in

(48:39):
life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential
thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.
So that's the scoop on the Olympics and how they
got started here. Yeah, one super quick addendum to the show.

(49:04):
It came up during our Q and A that there
is a medal for sportsmanship and Olympic Spirit. That's the
name for Pierre to Coopertan. It's only been awarded just
a very few times in Olympic history, and coincidentally, the
day after our show, it was awarded to uh Nikki
Hamblin of New Zealand and Abby Gagostino of the United States,
who are the runners who collided during their heat for
the women's five thousand meter race and then helped each

(49:26):
other up and basically continued to help each other as
they crossed the finish line. So that happened, and it
happened just after we had talked about him one more time.
Thank you everyone who waited around an additional two hours
for our folks. It was really incredible and I feel
like we have to thank the d M A like

(49:46):
to the high heavens. They were really incredible to work with.
Jesse Frasier, as we mentioned at the top of the episode,
was amazing. She was so spectacular and just rolled with
all of this craziness. And then when our event was over,
we had only a limit did time until the museum
went into lockdown for the night, and she ran us
around and showed us all the best stuff. She was incredible.
It was such a great evening. Like I said, despite

(50:07):
the frantic nous, thank you, thank you, thank you. I
don't have regular listener mail since we are running along
on this one, but I did want to do a
shout out related a little bit UH to museums, because
we've gotten a number of postcards from our listeners who
went to see the Visions le Bron exhibit that has
been touring UH, and I just wanted to say thank

(50:28):
you to them. In particular, we got one from Mary
Jane and it is lovely. It's one of her self portraits.
And then we got another from a listener whose name
is obscured on the postcard by postal markings, as all
too often happens, so I can't thank her by name,
but I will say it is the person who UH
recently relocated to London, so if that is you, thank you,

(50:49):
thank you, thank you. It is also another visual le
bla self portrait, but not the same one. So thank you. Guys.
I get so excited knowing that that you got excited
and went and saw this exhibit. So thank you, thank you.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast, at how stuff works dot com.
You can find us pretty much anywhere on social media
under the tag at missed in History, that goes for Twitter,

(51:11):
that goes for Facebook, that goes for Instagram, Tumbler, basically anywhere. Uh.
If you would like to, uh, go to our website,
you can do that. It is missed in History dot com.
We have show notes from every episode Tracy and I
have worked on together, as well as an archive of
every episode ever ever ever. Uh. You can also visit
our parent site, how stuff Works. Type in the words

(51:33):
Olympic or type in the word Olympics in the search bar,
and you're going to find all kinds of things about
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at misston history dot com and how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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