Olympic education as ‘l’education sportive’

Although almost all Olympic educators credit Pierre de Coubertin’s idea of ‘pedagogie sportive’ as the founding principle for Olympic education initiatives, there seemed to have been little evidence of ‘pedagogie sportive’ in many twentieth-century Olympic education efforts. Grounding an Olympic education programme in the physical domain is described in Naul’s (2008) analysis as the ‘the physical achievement through effort approach’ – an approach which focuses on the idea that individual and social development occurs through intense efforts to improve oneself in physical endeavours and through competition with others’ (p. 118). As noted in Chapter 1, this approach is most closely identified with the German scholar Rolf Geßmann (1992).