Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credits: 11:18 a.m., April 5, 2024
Despite comments now considered racist and misogynistic, Baron Pierre de Coubertin will soon be present at the Grévin museum. His wax statue is currently in progress and will be unveiled in three months, just before the start of the Paris Olympic Games on July 26.
Father of the modern Olympic Games in 1896 but a controversial personality today for positions considered misogynistic and racist, Pierre de Coubertin will have his wax statue at the Grévin Museum before the Paris Olympics, the Parisian establishment announced. The statue of the French baron, born in Paris in 1863, will enter the museum in July, before the start of the Olympic Games. It is currently being produced in workshops in the 13th arrondissement.
Convinced of the virtues of sport, Pierre de Coubertin had the visionary idea of reviving the Olympic Games of ancient Greece. The first edition of the modern Olympics took place in Athens in 1896, with only 300 athletes (two-thirds of whom were Greek), 14 countries and three continents represented, and nine sports on the program (compared to around forty in Paris this year). Two years earlier, the baron had founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
It is to Pierre de Coubertin that popular memory attributes the maxim “the important thing is to participate”. In reality, it was inspired by a sermon by the Bishop of Pennsylvania, Ethelbert Talbot, during the London Olympics in 1908. The baron died in Switzerland in 1937 at the age of 84, a year after the Olympics organized in Berlin by the Nazi regime, which he had not witnessed.
Over the years, he has become controversial because of certain opinions, however widely shared in his time and in his environment. In his Memoirs, he described himself as "a fanatical colonialist", recalls the City of Paris in a biographical notice published on its site. “Races are of different value, and to the white race, of superior essence, all others must owe allegiance,” he said, according to another quote reproduced on the Paris town hall website.
“The Olympic Games must be reserved for men. A female Olympics would be uninteresting, unsightly,” he also judged. “He evolved throughout his life, he often changed his mind. But he is much more complex than the few sentences that come out each time,” explained his great-great-niece, Diane de Navacelle de Coubertin, with the newspaper Le Parisien. “We reduce it to writings that shock us today. At the time they were not shocking,” she added.