Page:Coubertin - The Meeting of the Olympian Games, 1900.djvu/11

Rh Germany herself, for certainly neither the English nor the French purchase sporting implements from her. As for Sweden, the progress of sport was impeded for a long time by the rather exorbitant pretensions of the famous Swedish Gymnastics, which, having cured numbers of invalids and strengthened countless children, laid claim to suffice also for young men, and to supply for them the place of manly games and exercises of strength. This is, of course, not the case, and the fact that, by the action of the Crown Prince and representatives of gymnastics, with Major Balck at their head, all kinds of sport are more and more practiced, indicates clearly that no system of gymnastics, however complete and scientific it may be, can supply the place of their beneficent action. There are notably two establishments at Stockholm, Tattersall and Idrottspacken, which include all kinds of sport, from riding to skating, in conditions absolutely worthy of the finest American clubs of New York, Chicago or Boston.

At Vienna, in Austria, an athletic club has been recently opened in the celebrated Prater; the building, which is very elegant, is surrounded by football and lawn tennis grounds and tracks for cycling and foot-races. Lastly, even at St. Petersburg, where they are backward in this respect, a movement in favor of physical exercises is noticeable. It is thus clear that sport is gradually spreading over the whole world, and taking the place of unhealthy amusements and evil pleasures in the lives of young men. This fact will rejoice all true friends of youth and progress. Doubtless, one can discern and regret certain abuses. These may be found in everything; but when one compares the abuses which sport causes with those to which it puts an end, one cannot refrain from singing its praises and laboring for its propagation.

It is for this very purpose that I have revived the Olympian Games, and all that I have said here encourages me in this task. It has enemies, like every other free and living work, but it has also stanch friends who are of great assistance. It is to these that I appeal to prepare from this time onwards the celebration in America of the Olympian Games of 1904, in the persuasion that they will be a great success, and that they will draw across the ocean qualified representatives of all the sporting societies of the world, for a manifestation which will be both worthy of the noble and ancient Olympian past and of the glorious future of the great American Republic.