What is new in the world of Olympic sports nowadays? (Are we living in the final hours of Olympism?) Clouds on the sky of the Olympic Movement’s future

Abstract

Almost 130 years ago, on June 23, 1894, Dimitrios Vikélas and the French educator, historian and sports leader Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Coubertin first became secretary general and later president of the Committee. In a poem entitled “Ode to sport” written under a pseudonym in 1912, he expressed in the language of poetry the expectations that we can still find - more or less - in the text of the Olympic charter. I wonder what the sports leader Coubertin would say if he could visit the 2023 Olympic Games in Paris and see the “citius, altius, fortius” requirements are being pushed into the background by the non-sports aspects of daily politics? Would he have revised his position that “And you are fair, Sport”, yes! People often struggle for understanding and justice in vain, because if you are not with them, they discover it with you. Or is it fair that the IOC discriminates against certain nations (only one or two out of about forty) because of war conflicts? Yes, war is terrible, but what does the IOC have to do with it? As if the Olympic movement is competent in these matters! This can only happen because, unfortunately, Coubertin’s vision also becomes doubtful: O Sport, you are Peace! You promote happy relations between people, bringing them together in their shared devotion to a strength which is controlled, organized and self-disciplined. Yet the Ode threatens fraudsters with punishment: “He who, with some shameful trick, manages to deceive his fellow competitors feels guilty to his very core and lives in fear of the ignominious epithet which shall forever be attached to his name should his trickery be discovered.” Like in my previous articles, in this study, I classified the attacks on the universal values of sport into five groups (rings of five): doping, cheating, illegal spot betting, match-fixing and gender hacking. In this paper, without claiming to be complete, I only picked out a few counterexamples of the violation of the most important principles of Coubertin! And finally, here is the most astonishing question: Could the baron speak at all, or could he just mumble to himself because of today’s all-powerful political correctness? Overall, one should wonder if political correctness – although with benevolent intentions – may ruin the Olympic movement.