A Brief History of Olympic Flames
…, amazingly, after a 1500-year hiatus, the Olympic Games were revived by a French nobleman named Pierre de Coubertin who did it (écrasez l’infâme !) quite explicitly in the name of religion. More specifically, Coubertin saw his Olympic revival as an essential part of the widespread desire to create new religious forms more in tune with modern sentiments. It wasn’t “muscular Christianity,” exactly, but it was emphatically physical, and it was kind…
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