Essays in Idleness

The motto for the modern Olympic Games was suggested by a French Dominican friar, Louis Henri Didon, while hanging out with the first Olympian gamers. This I have learnt, from one of the Catholic ethnic papers. Père Didon got the motto from the school at which he was principal — Saint-Albert-le-Grand, in Paris, whose halls had echoed with: “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” A former military chaplain, and a prisoner and refugee during the Franco-Prussian War, he had developed the school into something like Arnold’s Rugby in England, with sports idolatry, but Catholic more than pagan in nuance.

“Faster, higher, stronger” is how we say this in English, since the launch of the modern games in Athens, 128 years ago. In this time the games, which began as strictly amateur, have degenerated into something professionally commercialized, and the cosmopolitan flavour has turned into a spectacle of vicious competitive nationalism. Every four years various statist cheering sections congregate, and a huge fortune is expended promoting the host country. There are also acts of compensating vandalism, such as the sabotage of the French national rail system this week. “The media” are drawn to spectacles, naturally, for they are the extravagant promoters of everything false.

Can more than this be said about The Olympics? Could we use them as a pretext to quote Pindar, on the victors at the ancient games (which included poetry)? But a moment’s study would reveal that modern athletics are the negation of the nobility recalled in Pindar, and the glorification of what is unquestionably fake.

Let us puff the opposite qualities to the ones currently on display in Paris; and embrace the phlegmatic, philosophical virtues.