Sport and the British - the rise of Olympism.
We're sitting just where de Coubertin would've sat in the 1880s.
Patrick Deramus, the school's current headmaster.
What de Coubertin found so persuasive really was the lessons that could be learnt through sport and the benefits that that would give in terms of educating the whole person and what he felt that Arnold had done was to introduce the whole idea of athletic chivalry, the lessons that one would learn from taking part in competitive games and playing the game in the right spirit and losing in the right sort of way as well. I find it quite humbling and really quite moving that de Coubertin spent a night in the Rugby Chapel just paying homage and respect to Arnold and what he stood for.
Pierre de Coubertin first became interested in sport for patriotic reasons. He believed that inferior physical fitness in young Frenchmen had played a part in their defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. If they played more sport at school, he thought, the outcome might have been different. He had a utopian vision of reconciling nationalism and internationalism whereby nations would compete on the sports field instead of on the battlefield. His celebration of the joy of effort, the educational value of striving to do one's best, could be combined with the respect for universal ethics, a spirit of tolerance, generosity, unity and friendship.
