ABSTRACT
Olympic education as a compulsory subject in the education of future physical education teachers seems to be a rare occurrence. However, it does exist in higher learning institutes, for example, in Russia and Ukraine, Spain and at some selected university institutes in the Czech Republic and Poland and at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Although compulsory Olympic education in higher learning institutes is an exception, it exists as an elective subject in some physical education teaching modules in university teacher education programmes (e.g. Germany, France, Spain, China and Japan). These elective courses depend on having qualified and interested teaching staff and usually an affiliation with a National Olympic Committee (NOC) or a National Olympic Academy (NOA). Contemporary training of physical education teachers includes topics related to teaching domains in the psycho-social area, but, with the exception of New Zealand, these topics rarely reference Olympism.
