This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Pierre de Coubertin, the French educator who revived the Olympic idea, was driven by more than admiration for antiquity. He came of age in a France still humiliated by its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, and he believed the country's young men had grown physically and morally soft from a narrow, classroom-bound education. Coubertin had studied England's school sports culture and concluded that organized athletic competition built the character a nation needed. German archaeologists' excavations at Olympia through the 1870s and 1880s, uncovering the ancient sanctuary's stadium and temples, had already returned the ancient Games to European conversation; Coubertin fused that renewed classical interest with his own reform project when he convened a congress at the Sorbonne in 1894 and founded the International Olympic Committee.
Coubertin had wanted the first Games held in Paris, but the committee chose Athens instead, honoring Greece as the symbolic birthplace of the idea. The choice nearly bankrupted the fledgling event: Greece's government balked at the cost of restoring the ancient Panathenaic Stadium in marble, and the Games were rescued only when the wealthy Greek businessman Georgios Averoff personally funded the reconstruction. Only men competed in 1896, a restriction Coubertin himself defended for years afterward, believing women's participation would be, in his own words, impractical and uninteresting.
The Games nearly did not survive their own early instability. The 1900 Paris and 1904 St. Louis Games were folded into World's Fairs, stretched across months, poorly organized, and barely recognized by spectators as a distinct event at all. Only with the 1908 London Games, held on their own and drawing genuine international attention, did the modern Olympic movement establish the standalone identity Coubertin had originally envisioned.