Coubertin, gold medal in Olympic poetry, makes sense in days of war

Natalia Arriaga Madrid, 21 Mar The World Poetry Day celebrated on March 21 pays little attention to the field of sport, despite the fact that great poets such as Homer, Nicolás Guillén, Rafael Alberti and Luis García Montero dedicated famous verses to this activity. The sporting event par excellence of the international calendar, the Olympic Games, held artistic competitions between its events between the 1912 and 1948 editions on the initiative of the French baron Pierre de Coubertin, who has gone down in history as the restorer of the Games of the modern era. Coubertin was a staunch defender of the brotherhood relationship between sport and culture and it was his idea that sports competitions should be joined by others of an artistic nature, including the literary competition. At the Stockholm Games 2012, the baron won the gold medal for literature with a poetic composition entitled 'Ode to Sport', which he signed in French and German under a double pseudonym: Georg Hohrod and Martin Eschbach. Coubertin did not reveal that the authorship was his own until seven years later. “Oh, Sport, pleasure of the gods, essence of life. You have suddenly appeared among the light gray in which the thankless work of modern existence is stirred, as the radiant messenger of the disappeared eras, of those times when humanity smiled”, begins the work that earned the gold medal and which today, with the effects on the sport of war in Ukraine, acquires a new meaning. In the next eight stanzas, Coubertin's lyrical composition explores the relationship between sport and beauty, justice, audacity, honor, joy, fruitfulness, progress and, finally, peace. “Oh, Sport, you are Peace. You promote happy relations between peoples, uniting them in their shared devotion to a controlled, organized and self-disciplined force. From you, young people all over the world learn to respect themselves and, thus, the diversity of qualities of each nation becomes the source of a generous and friendly rivalry”, ends the ode of the French nobleman. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) that Coubertin founded at Sorbonne University in 1894 is now focused, almost 128 years later, on spreading these messages of peace among the sports community and channeling aid to Ukrainian athletes who, due to the invasion of their country by Russian troops, are unable to train, compete or, at the very least, to live in decent conditions. “Our guiding principle is peace,” said current IOC President Thomas Bach. “Our founder, Pierre de Coubertin, entrusted us with this mission. When he revived the Olympic Games and created the IOC in 1894, with the full support of the International Peace Movement of the time, he said: 'If the institution of the Olympic Games prospers, it can become a powerful factor in ensuring universal peace, '” the German leader recalled last week in an open letter to the athletes of the world. Those “afflicted”, in this case by the war, must remember that sport “can bring them healthy entertainment in their anguish”, as Coubertin stated in his ode, Olympic champion of literature in 1912. CHIEF nam