In 1886 the young French nobleman Pierre de Coubertin made his customary pilgrimage to Rugby School in England. He wandered around the playing fields, and ended up in the chapel where Rugby’s famous headmaster Thomas Arnold is buried. Quite wrongly, Coubertin imagined that Arnold had invented the “sporting spirit”: the notion that sport turns athletes into gentlemen who believe in fair play. Coubertin eventually created the modern Olympic Games in the hope of spreading this spirit around the world.
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