The French Historian Who Invented the Olympics

The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris come 128 years after the first modern Olympics. But the fact that we tend to think of the game as a 2,000-plus-year-old tradition was very much the plan from the start. Humanities scholar Louis Callebat explains that Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a humanist, historian, and social scientist with a firm grounding in Graeco-Roman culture and a commitment to cultural and physical education, had a specific vision for harnessing an ancient tradition for modern purposes.