Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Exposition Universelle of1900 and the 1900Summer Olympics,thatstarted on a day like today in 1900.
The Exposition Universelle of 1900was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from 14 April to 12 November 1900, to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next. It was the sixth of ten major expositions held in the city between 1855 and 1937.
It was held at the esplanade of Les Invalides, the Champ de Mars, the Trocadéro and at the banks of the Seine between them, with an additional section in the Bois de Vincennes, and it was visited by more than fifty million people. Many international congresses and other events were held within the framework of the exposition, including the 1900 Summer Olympics.
Many technological innovations were displayed at the Fair, including the Grande Roue de Paris ferris wheel, the Rue de l'Avenir moving sidewalk, the first ever regular passenger trolleybus line, escalators, diesel engines, electric cars, dry cell batteries, electric fire engines, talking films, the telegraphone (the first magnetic audio recorder), the galalith and the matryoshka dolls. It also brought international attention to the Art Nouveau style. Additionally, it showcased France as a major colonial power through numerous pavilions built on the hill of the Trocadéro Palace.
Major structures built for the exposition include the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, the Pont Alexandre III, the Gare d'Orsay railroad station, and the Paris Métro Line 1 (including its entrances designed by Hector Guimard), all of which survive today (including two original canopied Métro entrances).
The 1900 Summer Olympics, in French Jeux olympiques d'été de 1900, today officially known as the Games of the II Olympiad (Jeux de la IIe olympiade) and also known as Paris 1900, were an international multi-sport event that took place in Paris, France, from 14 May to 28 October 1900. No opening or closing ceremonies were held.
At the Olympic Congress of 1894, which convened in the Sorbonne building, Pierrede Coubertin proposed that the Olympic Games should take place in Paris in 1900. However, the delegates to the conference were unwilling to wait six years and lobbied to hold the first games in 1896. A decision was made to hold the first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens and have Paris host the second Games.
The Games were held as part of the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair). In total, 1,226 competitors took part in 19 different sports. This number relies on certain assumptions about which events were and were not Olympic. Many athletes, some of whom had won events, were unaware they had competed in the Olympic Games.
Women took part in the games for the first time, with sailor Hélène de Pourtalès, born Helen Barbey in New York City, becoming the first female Olympic champion. The decision to hold competitions on a Sunday brought protests from many American athletes, who traveled as representatives of their colleges and were expected to withdraw rather than compete on their religious day of rest.
Most of the winners in 1900 did not receive medals but were given cups or trophies. Professionals competed in fencing, as was tradition, and Albert Robert Ayat (France), who won the épée for amateurs and masters, was awarded a prize of 3,000 F. Some events were contested for the only time in the history of the Games, including angling, motor racing, ballooning, cricket, croquet, Basque pelota, 200m swimming obstacle race and underwater swimming. This was also the only Olympic Games in history to use live animals (pigeons) as targets during the shooting event. The host nation of France fielded 72% of all athletes (720 of the 997) and won the most gold, silver and bronze medal placings. U.S. athletes won the second-most in each while fielding the fifth-most participants, 75. British athletes won the third-most in each while fielding the second most participants, 102.
The 1900 Games were held as part of the 1900 Exposition Universelle. The Baron de Coubertin believed this would help public awareness of the Olympics and submitted elaborate plans to rebuild the ancient site of Olympia, complete with statues, temples, stadia, and gymnasia. The director of the ExpositionUniverselle, Alfred Picard, thought holding an ancient sport event at the Exposition Universelle was an absurd anachronism. After thanking de Coubertin for his plans, Picard filed them away and nothing more came of it.
A committee was formed for the organization of the Games, consisting of some of the more able sports administrators of the day, and a provisional program was drawn up. Sports to be included at the games were track and field athletics, swimming, wrestling, gymnastics, fencing, French and British boxing, river and ocean yacht racing, cycling, golf, lifesaving, archery, weightlifting, rowing, diving, and water polo.
Today, The Grandma has been remembering her participation in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games. It was an amazing and unforgettable experience, and she has great memories about it.
The Grandma has read about the first International Olympic Games held in modern history,celebrated in Athens that started on a day like today in 1896.
The 1896 Summer Olympics, in Greek Θερινοί Ολυμπιακοί Αγώνες 1896, officially known as the Games of the I Olympiad, was the first international Olympic Games held in modern history.
Organized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which had been created by French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, it was held in Athens, Greece, from 6 to 15 April 1896.
Fourteen nations (according to the IOC, though the number is subject to interpretation) and 241 athletes (all males; this number is also disputed) took part in the games. Participants were all European, or living in Europe, except the United States team. Over 65% of the competing athletes were Greek.
Winners were given a silver medal, while runners-up received a copper medal. Retroactively, the IOC has converted these to gold and silver, and awarded bronze medals to third placed athletes. Ten of the 14 participating nations earned medals.
The United States won the most gold medals, 11, while host nation Greece won the most medals overall, 46. The highlight for the Greeks was the marathon victory by their compatriot Spyridon Louis. The most successful competitor was German wrestler and gymnast Carl Schuhmann, who won four events.
Athens had been unanimously chosen to stage the inaugural modern Games during a congress organized by Coubertin in Paris on 23 June 1894, during which the IOC was also created, because Greece was the birthplace of the Ancient Olympic Games.
The main venue was the Panathenaic Stadium, where athletics and wrestling took place; other venues included the Neo Phaliron Velodrome for cycling, and the Zappeion for fencing.
The opening ceremony was held in the Panathenaic Stadium on 6 April, during which most of the competing athletes were aligned on the infield, grouped by nation. After a speech by the president of the organizing committee, Crown Prince Constantine, his father officially opened the Games. Afterwards, nine bands and 150 choir singers performed an Olympic Hymn, composed by Spyridon Samaras, with words by poet Kostis Palamas.
The 1896 Olympics were regarded as a great success.
The Games had the largest international participation of any sporting event to that date. The Panathenaic Stadium overflowed with the largest crowd ever to watch a sporting event.
After the Games, Coubertin and the IOC were petitioned by several prominent figures, including Greece's King George and some American competitors in Athens, to hold all the following Games in Athens.
However, the 1900 Summer Olympics were already planned for Paris and, except for the Intercalated Games of 1906, the Olympics did not return to Greece until the 2004 Summer Olympics, 108 years later.
During the 19th century, several small-scale sports festivals across Europe were named after the Ancient Olympic Games. The 1870 Olympics at the Panathenaic stadium, which had been refurbished for the occasion, had an audience of 30,000 people.
Pierre de Coubertin, a French pedagogue and historian, adopted Dr William Penny Brookes' idea to establish a multi-national and multi-sport event -the ancient games only allowed male athletes of Greek origin to participate.
In 1890, Coubertin wrote an article in La Revue Athletique, which espoused the importance of Much Wenlock a rural market town in the English county of Shropshire. It was here that, in October 1850, the local physician William Penny Brookes had founded the Wenlock Olympian Games, a festival of sports and recreations that included athletics and team sports, such as cricket, football and quoits.
Coubertin also took inspiration from
the earlier Greek games organized under the name of Olympics by
businessman and philanthropist Evangelis Zappas in 1859, 1870 and 1875.
The 1896 Athens Games were funded by the legacies of Evangelis Zappas
and his cousin Konstantinos Zappas and by George Averoff who had been
specifically requested by the Greek government, through crown prince
Constantine, to sponsor the second refurbishment of the Panathenaic
Stadium.
On 6 April, 25 March according to the Julian calendar then in use in Greece, thegames of the First Olympiad were officially opened; it was Easter Monday for both the Western and Eastern Christian Churches and the anniversary of Greece's independence.
The Panathenaic Stadium was filled with an estimated 80,000 spectators, including King George I of Greece, his wife Olga, and their sons. Most of the competing athletes were aligned on the infield, grouped by nation.
On the morning of Sunday 12 April or 3 April, according to the Julian calendar then used in Greece, King George organized a banquet for officials and athletes even though some competitions had not yet been held.
During his speech, he made clear that, as far as he was concerned, the Olympics should be held in Athens permanently. The official closing ceremony was held the following Wednesday, after being postponed from Tuesday due to rain. Again the royal family attended the ceremony, which was opened by the national anthem of Greece and an ode composed in ancient Greek by George S. Robertson, a British athlete and scholar.
Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to read a little about Pierre de Coubertin,the French educator and historian, founder of the International Olympic Committee and father ofthe modern Olympic Games.
Barcelona had the honour of being an Olympic City in 1992 and The Grandma wants to talk about the figure of a man who changed the idea of collective sport, a man who was died on a day like today in 1937 and whose legacy is still a great example of success.
Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin (1 January 1863-2 September 1937, also known as Pierre de Coubertin and Baron de Coubertin) wasa French educator and historian, founder of theInternational Olympic Committee, and its secondpresident. He is known as the father of the modern Olympic Games.
Born into a French aristocratic family, he became an academic and studied a broad range of topics, most notably education and history. He graduated with a degree in law and public affairs from the Paris Institute of Political Studies. It was at Sciences Po that he came up with the idea of the Summer OlympicGames.
The Pierre de Coubertin medal, also known as the Coubertin medal or theTrue Spirit of Sportsmanship medal, is an award given by the International Olympic Committee to athletes who demonstrate the spirit of sportsmanship in the Olympic Games.
Pierre de Frédy was born in Paris on 1 January 1863, into an 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 Frédy name had first arrived in France in the early 15th century, and 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. But other branches of his family tree delved even further into French history, and the annals of both sides of his family included nobles of various stations, military leaders and associates of kings and princes of France.
The subject which he seems 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 ofphysical education instituted under Thomas Arnold at the Rugby School. Coubertin credited these methods with leading to the expansion of British power during the 19th century and advocated their use in French institutions. The inclusion of physical education in the curriculum of French schools would become an ongoing pursuit and passion of Coubertin's.
Pierre de Coubertin
Coubertin is thought to have exaggerated the importance of sport to ThomasArnold, whom he viewed as one of the founders of athleticchivalry. The character-reforming influence of sport with which Coubertin was so impressed is more likely to have originated in the novel Tom Brown's School Days rather than exclusively in the ideas of Arnold himself.
Nonetheless, Coubertin was an enthusiast in need of a cause and he found it in England and in Thomas Arnold. Thomas Arnold, the leaderand classic model of English educators, wrote Coubertin, gavethe precise formula for the role of athletics in education. The cause was quicklywon. Playing fields sprang up all over England.
Intrigued by what he had read about English public schools, in 1883, at the age of twenty, Frédy went to Rugby and to other English schools to see for himself. He described the results in a book, L'Education enAngleterre, which was published in Paris in 1888. This hero of his book is Thomas Arnold, and on his second visit in 1886, Coubertin reflected on Arnold's influence in the chapel at Rugby School.
What Coubertin saw on the playing fields of Rugby and the other English schools he visited was how organised sport can create moral and social strength. Not only did organised games help to set the mind and body in equilibrium, it also prevented the time being wasted in other ways. First developed by the ancient Greeks, it was an approach to education that he felt the rest of the world had forgotten and to whose revival he was to dedicate the rest of his life.
As a historian and a thinker on education, Coubertin romanticised 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. He saw in these gymnasia what he called a triple unity between old and young, between disciplines, and between different types of people, meaning between those whose work was theoretical and those whose work was practical. Coubertin advocated for these concepts, this triple unity, to be incorporated into schools.
But while Coubertin was certainly a romantic, and while his idealised vision of ancient Greece would lead him later to the idea of reviving the OlympicGames,his advocacy for physical education was based on practical concerns as well. He believed that men who received physical education would be better prepared to fight in wars, and better able to win conflicts like the Franco-Prussian War, in which France had been humiliated. He also saw sport as democratic, in that sports competition crossed class lines, although it did so without causing a mingling of classes, which he did not support.
Unfortunately for Coubertin, his efforts to incorporate more physical education into French schools failed. The failure of this endeavour, however, was closely followed by the development of a new idea, the revival of the ancientOlympic Games, the creation of a festival of international athleticism.
He was the referee of the first ever French championship rugby union final on 20 March 1892, between Racing Club de France and Stade Français.
Pierre de Coubertin
Coubertin is the instigator of the modern Olympic movement, a man whose vision and political skill led to the revival of the OlympicGames which had been practised in antiquity.
Coubertin idealized the OlympicGames as the ultimate ancientathleticcompetition.
Thomas Arnold, the Head Master of Rugby School, was an important influence on Coubertin's thoughts about education, but his meetings with William Penny Brookes also influenced his thinking about athletic competition to some extent. A trained physician, Brookes believed that the best way to prevent illness was through physical exercise. In 1850, he had initiated a local athletic competition that he referred to as Meetings of the Olympian Class at the Gaskell recreation ground at Much Wenlock, Shropshire.
Along with the Liverpool Athletic Club, who began holding their own OlympicFestival in the 1860s, Brookes created a National Olympian Association which aimed to encourage such local competition in cities across Britain. These efforts were largely ignored by the British sporting establishment. Brookes also maintained communication with the government and sporting advocates in Greece, seeking a revival of the Olympic Games internationally under the auspices of the Greek government. There, the philanthropist cousins Evangelos and Konstantinos Zappas had used their wealth to fund Olympics within Greece, and paid for the restoration of the Panathinaiko Stadium that was later used during the 1896 Summer Olympics.
The efforts of Brookes to encourage the internationalization of these games came to naught. However, Dr. Brookes did organize a national Olympic Games in London, at Crystal Palace, in 1866 and this was the first Olympics to resemble an Olympic Games to be held outside of Greece. But while others had created Olympic contests within their countries, and broached the idea of international competition, it was Coubertin whose work would lead to the establishment of the International Olympic Committee and the organisation of the first modern Olympic Games.
In 1888, Coubertin founded the Comité pour la Propagation des Exercises Physiques more well known as the Comité Jules Simon. Coubertin's earliest reference to the modern notion of Olympic Games criticizes the idea.
The idea for reviving the Olympic Games as an international competition came to Coubertin in 1889, apparently independently of Brookes, and he spent the following five years organizing an international meeting of athletes and sports enthusiasts that might make it happen.
Dr Brookes had organised a national Olympic Games that was held at Crystal Palace in London in 1866. In response to a newspaper appeal, Brookes wrote to Coubertin in 1890, and the two began an exchange of letters on education and sport. Although he was too old to attend the 1894 Congress, Brookes would continue to support Coubertin's efforts, most importantly by using his connections with the Greek government to seek its support in the endeavour.
While Brookes'
contribution to the revival of the Olympic Games was recognised in
Britain at the time, Coubertin in his later writings largely neglected
to mention the role the Englishman played in their development.
Pierre de Coubertin
He did mention the roles of Evangelis Zappas and his cousin Konstantinos Zappas, but drew a distinction between their founding of athletic Olympics and his own role in the creation of an international contest.
However, Coubertin together with A. Mercatis, a close friend of Konstantinos, encouraged the Greek government to utilise part of Konstantinos' legacy to fund the 1896 Athens Olympic Games separately and in addition to the legacy of Evangelis Zappas that Konstantinos had been executor of. Moreover, George Averoff was invited by the Greek government to fund the second refurbishment of the Panathinaiko Stadium that had already been fully funded by Evangelis Zappas forty years earlier.
Coubertin's advocacy for the Games centred on a number of ideals about sport. He believed that the early ancient Olympics encouraged competition among amateur rather than professional athletes, and saw value in that. The ancient practice of a sacred truce in association with the Games might have modern implications, giving the Olympics a role in promoting peace. This role was reinforced in Coubertin's mind by the tendency of athletic competition to promote understanding across cultures, thereby lessening the dangers of war. In addition, he saw the Games as important in advocating his philosophical ideal for athletic competition: that the competition itself, the struggle to overcome one's opponent, was more important than winning.
As Coubertin prepared for his Congress, he continued to develop a philosophy of the Olympic Games. While he certainly intended the Games to be a forum for competition between amateur athletes, his conception of amateurism was complex.
By 1894, the year the
Congress was held, he publicly criticised the type of amateur
competition embodied in English rowing contests, arguing that its
specific exclusion of working-class athletes was wrong. While he
believed that athletes should not be paid to be such, he did think that
compensation was in order for the time when athletes were competing and
would otherwise have been earning money.
Following the establishment of a definition for an amateur athlete at the 1894 Congress, he would continue to argue that this definition should be amended as necessary, and as late as 1909 would argue that the Olympic movement should develop its definition of amateurism gradually.
Along with the development of an Olympic philosophy, Coubertin invested time in the creation and development of a national association to coordinate athletics in France, the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA).
In 1889, French
athletics associations had grouped together for the first time and
Coubertin founded a monthly magazine La Revue Athletique, the first
French periodical devoted exclusively to athletics and modelled on The
Athlete,an English journal established around 1862. Formed by seven
sporting societies with approximately 800 members, by 1892 the
association had expanded to 62 societies with 7,000 members.
Pierre de Coubertin
That November, at the annual meeting of the USFSA, Coubertin first publicly suggested the idea of reviving the Olympics. His speech met general applause, but little commitment to the Olympic ideal he was advocating for, perhaps because sporting associations and their members tended to focus on their own area of expertise and had little identity as sportspeople in a general sense.
This disappointing result was prelude to a number of challenges he would face in organising his international conference. In order to develop support for the conference, he began to play down its role in reviving Olympic Games and instead promoted it as a conference on amateurism in sport which, he thought, was slowly being eroded by betting and sponsorships. This led to later suggestions that participants were convinced to attend under false pretenses.
Little interest was expressed by those he spoke to during trips to the United States in 1893 and London in 1894, and an attempt to involve the Germans angered French gymnasts who did not want the Germans invited at all. Despite these challenges, the USFSA continued its planning for the games, adopting in its first program for the meeting eight articles to address, only one of which had to do with the Olympics. A later program would give the Olympics a much more prominent role in the meeting.
The congress was held on 23 June 1894 at the Sorbonne in Paris. Once there, participants divided the congress into two commissions, one on amateurism and the other on reviving the Olympics. A Greek participant, Demetrius Vikelas, was appointed to head the commission on the Olympics, and would later become the first President of the International Olympic Committee.
Along with Coubertin, C. Herbert of Britain's Amateur Athletic Association and W.M. Sloane of the United States helped lead the efforts of the commission. In its report, the commission proposed that Olympic Games be held every four years and that the program for the Games be one of modern rather than ancient sports. They also set the date and location for the first modernOlympicGames, the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, and the second, the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Coubertin had originally opposed the choice of Greece, as he had concerns about the ability of a weakened Greek state to host the competition, but was convinced by Vikelas to support the idea.
The commission's proposals were accepted unanimously by the congress, and the modern Olympic movement was officially born. The proposals of the other commission, on amateurism, were more contentious, but this commission also set important precedents for the Olympic Games, specifically the use of heats to narrow participants and the banning of prize money in most contests. Following the Congress, the institutions created there began to be formalized into the InternationalOlympicCommittee (IOC), with Demetrius Vikelas as its first President.
Pierre de Coubertin
The work of the IOC increasinglyfocused on the planning the 1896 AthensGames, and de Coubertin played a background role as Greek authorities took the lead in logistical organisation of the Games in Greece itself, offering technical advice such as a sketch of a design of a velodrome to be used in cycling competitions. He also took the lead in planning the program of events, although to his disappointment neither polo, football, or boxing were included in 1896. The Greek organizing committee had been informed that four foreign football teams were to participate however not one foreign football team showed up and despite Greek preparations for a football tournament it was cancelled during the Games.
The Greek authorities were frustrated that he could not provide an exact estimate of the number of attendees more than a year in advance.
In France, Coubertin's efforts to elicit interest in the Games among athletes and the press met difficulty, largely because the participation of German athletes angered French nationalists who begrudged Germany their victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Germany also threatened not to participate after rumours spread that Coubertin had sworn to keep Germany out, but following a letter to the Kaiser denying the accusation, the German National Olympic Committee decided to attend.
Coubertin himself was frustrated by the Greeks, who increasingly ignored him in their planning and who wanted to continue to hold the Games in Athens every four years, against de Coubertin's wishes. The conflict was resolved after he suggested to the King of Greece that he hold pan-Hellenic games in between Olympiads, an idea which the King accepted, although Coubertin would receive some angry correspondence even after the compromise was reached and the King did not mention him at all during the banquet held in honour of foreign athletes during the 1896 Games.
Coubertin took over the IOC presidency when Demetrius Vikelas stepped down after the Olympics in his own country. Despite the initial success, the OlympicMovement faced hard times, as the 1900 in De Coubertin's own Paris and 1904 Games were both swallowed by World's Fairs in the same cities, and received little attention. The Paris Games were not organised by Coubertin or the IOC nor were they called Olympics at that time. The St. Louis Games was hardly internationalized.
The 1906 Summer Olympics revived the momentum, and the OlympicGames have come to be regarded as the world's foremost sports competition.
Coubertin created the modern pentathlon for the 1912 Olympics, and subsequently stepped down from his IOC presidency after the 1924 Olympics in Paris, which proved much more successful than the first attempt in that city in 1900. He was succeeded as president, in 1925, by Belgian Henri de Baillet-Latour.
Years later Coubertin came out of retirement to lend his prestige to assisting Berlin to land the 1936 games. In exchange, Germany nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. The 1935 winner, however, was the anti-Nazi Carl von Ossietzky.
Coubertin won the gold medal for literature at the 1912 Summer Olympics for his poem Ode to Sport.
Coubertin entered his poem Ode to Sport under the pseudonym of Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach which were the names of villages close to his wife's place of birth.
The Olympic mottoCitius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) was proposed by Coubertin in 1894 and has been official since 1924. The motto was coined by Henri Didon OP, a friend of Coubertin, for a Paris youth gathering of 1891.
The Pierre de Coubertin medal, also known as the Coubertin medal or the True Spirit of Sportsmanship medal, is an award given by the InternationalOlympic Committee to those athletes that demonstrate the spirit of sportsmanship in the Olympic Games. This medal is considered by many athletes and spectators to be the highest award that an Olympic athlete can receive, even greater than a gold medal. The International OlympicCommittee considers it as its highest honour.
.jpg)
