[MUSIC]. [BLANK_AUDIO]. Hello. The revival of the Olympic Games was written in the spirit of the time. Western Europe had never forgot the magnificence of the Ancient Olympic Games. Different people in several countries organized, at least since the 17th century, festivals that remembered the Olympic games. However, the vast majority of them were developed on a local, regional or national basis. At the end of the 19th century, even though, everything was mature for starting the project of the worldwide Games: It appeared the figure of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, who created a series of fundamental principles around which the Olympic movement is articulated. In this context, the emergence of the modern means of transportation and telecommunications, the international expositions and the internationalism, configured a world with a positive cultural ambiance to a global Games. A world that became increasingly interconnected during the last decades of the 19th century. The French Pierre de Coubertin entered the history as the driver of the recovery of the Olympic Games. Coubertin was the booster of the modern Olympics and he was the father of the philosophy that lies in the Olympic phenomenon, which is called Olympism. Olympism, which according to Müller was coined by Coubertin in 1910, involved the moral attitude of an individual, and on that basis, the attitude of all humanity as well. In this sense, Coubertin aimed to give gravity to his ideas and he introduced the religious goals of the ancient Olympic Games into the modern version, without changing the spiritual sense of the Games, according to Norbert Müller. We can find a clear definition of Olympism in the principles of the Olympic Movement, established in the Olympic Charter: Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles. The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity. Coubertin was born on January 1, 1863 in a French middle aristocratic family and studied in a Jesuit school. After two months, he left a military academy. Then he attended the Ecole Supérieure des Sciencies Politiques. This school, which used a modern systems of teaching and learning, strengthened Coubertin's interest for the Anglo-Saxon culture. According to Lolam, his experiences with the school system led to a strong conviction that it was necessary to reform the French education. This first vision will influence the key role that education has in Olympism. The defeat of France in the French-Prussian war affected very much the young French men of Coubertin's époque. To the extent that he thought that this defeat was due to the better physical preparation of the Prussian Army. That reinforced his idea that education should have a key role in the policy of government. In a world of swift changes, education gave individuals the capacity to adapt to the new environment. Coubertin considered that was the century to reform the education in France. Between 1883 and 1887, he visited the United Kingdom and different high education centres. Afterwards, he traveled to the United States of America in 1889 to study in-depth some of its most prestigious educational institutions, such as Harvard or Princeton, as a result of an official assignment from the Ministry of Public Instruction of France. Pierre de Coubertin was a very prolific writer. In his 74 years of life, he wrote 34 books and 11,000 articles. He also developed a very extensive teaching labour that evolved through time in some aspects, but whose essence stands since the first years of the Olympic Movement. Coubertin was the International Olympic Committee president who was the most time in his post. He was President since 1896, after the Athens Olympics, until 1925, after the Prague Olympic Congress. As Norbert Müller points out, during his last most important public speech of the later years of his life, Coubertin highlighted the core ideas of Olympism. This speech was broadcast on radio in 1935 and can be summarised and in this three sayings: To celebrate the Olympic Games is to appeal to history. Olympism is not a system, but a spiritual and moral attitude. And my unshakable faith in youth and the future has been and remains the principle that gives life to my work. Coubertin died on September 2, 1937. Following his will, his heart was buried in Olympia in a marble stele that was erected on March 25, 1938 to commemorate the restoration of the Olympic Games. Even though Coubertin was a very prolific writer, his thought is not a systematic philosophy a group of ideas that evolved with time but that maintain their essence. According to Dikaia Chatziefstathiou and Ian Henry, the Olypism created by Coubertin was a mixture of filo-Hellenism, the ancient values of body, and mind and spirit and the English athleticism, which had been related to the 19th century's preeminence of the British Empire. According to Lolam, we can characterize Olympism as a secular vitalistic humanism of the muscles. Despite that Coubertin was not an original intellectual, who hardly came close to the works of Nietzsche or Bergson, the official ideology of the Olympic Movement, Olympism, is perhaps the version of the unit-idea of humanism which has had the greatest impact on the lives of ordinary men and women in the 20th century. Therefore, to summarize the cultural of peace in which education has a crucial role, the internationalism, the influence of the classic culture of Greece or the educational systems in USA and England were elements that determined the ideology of the revival of the Olympic Games. [BLANK_AUDIO]
