ABSTRACT
In 1994, exactly 100 years since its creation, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) adopted the environment as the ‘third pillar’ of Olympism. The Olympic ideology promoted by the IOC since its creation was henceforth no longer founded on the unity of sport and culture alone, as extolled by Baron Pierre de Coubertin at the beginning of the twentieth century, but was completed — for the twenty-first century — by ecological concerns. Five years later, the IOC adopted an Agenda 21 for the Olympic Movement, that is, a series of sustainable development principles to be respected by all the organizations it coordinates in order to stage Olympic summer or winter games every four years. On the same occasion, it added a thirteenth mission to the long list in the Olympic Charter of those it has taken upon itself. The new mission seeks ‘to encourage and support a responsible concern for environmental issues, to promote sustainable development in sport and to require that the Olympic Games are held accordingly’. [1]
