What Coubertin Would Say Today
One hundred years ago, Pierre De Coubertin said, “There is a place in this world is very indifferent to the Olympic Games, that’s Paris.”
The 5th stop of the Olympic torch relay is Pierre De Coubertin’s home town, Paris. Pierre De Coubertin is best known as the founder of the International Olympic Committee. Because of that, the stop had special meaning. As Jiang Xiao Yu, the Executive Vice-President of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, said during the ceremony, the Beijing Olympic Game torch cames to Paris to visit Coubertin’s home town and to express the respect to the place where the moder Olympic Games was born.
However, the torch relay had been disrupted by some pro Independence Tibetan and their supporters, using violence. Even the disabled girl on a wheel chair, Jin Jing, was not spared from the attacks. All those happened under the encouragement from certain officials of Paris and under the watch of Bertrand Delanoe, Mayor of Paris. There was a banner for human rights hanging from the Paris city hall building. There were city officials hang Tibetan Flag and anti Olympic signs right out of the windows of the city hall. That lead to the cancellation of the Touch hand-off ceremony planed at the Paris City Hall. The torch relay was chaotic. The flame that represents our human beings’ common dream and the spirit of Olympic Games was put out in Paris. The city of Paris and its mayor Les Halles did that.
The City of Paris publicly betrayed the spirit of Olympic Games. Now the Bertrand Delanoe crowd seems had not had enough drama, they gave the “honorary citizenship” to Dalai Lama and continue using the faulty Tibet issue pressing China and to disrupt the Olympic Games.
This reminded us a hundred years ago how Coubertin experienced the similar situation for his Olympic Games from the similar Bertrand Delanoe crowd. Despite the initial success, the Olympic Movement faced hard times, as the 1900 (in De Coubertin’s own Paris) and 1904 Games were both swallowed by World’s Fairs, and received little attention. The city used Olympic Game to decorate the World’s Fairs and totally changed the original purpose of the Games. In his diary, Coubertin expressed his angry and disappointment about his hometown Paris, “There is a place in this world is very indifferent to the Olympic Games, that’s Paris.”
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