On Wednesday, along with the rest of the family, I was on the edge of my seat for a couple of hours watching the Germany v. Hungary match. What a nail-biting contest that was! What made the result particularly exciting is that Germany will now play England next week in the last 16 of the competition. For an Anglo-German household like ours, it doesn’t get much better than this. The popcorn has already been ordered.
In a few weeks’ time, of course, we also have the excitement of the Tokyo Olympics, not to mention the prospect of the football World Cup in Qatar next year. While we are far from being in a Covid-free world yet, there is definitely a sense of things opening up in the sports world, with crowds returning and a gradual return to normality.
Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a booklet given to me as a child about the 1972 Munich Olympics, the venue of last night’s Euros game. This really captured my imagination, especially a section devoted to the history of the Olympics and their founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. An interesting contrast can be drawn between this great Frenchman, whose inspiration it was to revive the Olympic Games for the modern era, and that other genius, Jules Rimet, who founded the football World Cup. Both were inspired by high ideals and between them made an indelible mark on the world sporting landscape. However, their visions were very different, reflecting their contrasting backgrounds and political philosophies.
De Coubertin was a Jesuit-educated academic and aristocrat with a deep interest in educational matters. Like many of his era, he was inspired by what he saw as the ideals of the ancient Greeks, combining this with a fascination with the reforms Dr Thomas Arnold had introduced into the English public school system. The character-forming influence of sport became his abiding obsession following visits he made to English schools in the 1880s and this, alongside romantic notions of Greek athletic combat, gradually led to his forming the International Olympic Committee and reviving the ancient Games. He believed that this would promote understanding across cultures, help prevent war and foster a cult of amateurism, which he saw as a higher ideal than professional sportsmanship.
Rimet had a more troubled background. His father, a farmer, had been forced to sell his land as a result of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the family moved to the working class Parisian quarter of Gros-Caillou. As he grew up, he was moved by the economic hardship experienced by his fellow workers and, inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on labour and capital, Rerum Novarum, started a movement offering help to the poorest of the poor. Significantly, he began to see sport as a way out of poverty for talented young men and as a means of promoting social harmony. In the latter respect, his ideas were not far removed from de Coubertin’s. In 1897 he founded the Red Star club which went on to win the French football cup three times in a row in the 1920s. After the end of the Great War Rimet became president of the French football federation and a few years later president of Fifa, a post he held for 33 years.
Believing, like de Coubertin, that sport could ‘propagate understanding and reconciliation between the races of the world’, he formed with Fifa the idea of an international football competition. Uruguay offered to part-fund this and so Rimet and a group of European teams crossed the Atlantic in 1930 for the inaugural World Cup. Rimet carried the trophy that was later to bear his name – a representation of the Athenian goddess of Victory – in his bag. Famously, this was stolen just before the 1966 World Cup in England, only to be recovered from a London suburban garden by a dog named Pickles. It was stolen again when on display in Brazil and never recovered.
A devout Catholic, Rimet was opposed to the amateur ideal, believing that working class footballers should have the chance to earn a living away from the factories that would otherwise have claimed them. He was opposed to what he termed the ‘closed, disdainful oligarchy’ of de Coubertin and his disciples and, despite the ideas they had in common, was unimpressed by the public school spirit that had influenced his fellow Frenchman. The fact that the two competitions these men founded continue to flourish suggests both their visions were valid, although both have undergone considerable modifications along the way. We remain in their debt and have a great deal to look forward to this summer and next as a result.