Runited for its 78e session, the United Nations General Assembly adopted, on Tuesday, November 21, the resolution entitled “For the building of a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal”, presented to it by Tony Estanguet. The president of the organizing committee for the Paris 2024 Games called, like all his predecessors since 1993, for the Olympic truce which would have been observed in ancient Greece.
For the first time in the history of the modern Games, the truce resolution was not decided on Tuesday by consensus of the 193 members of the United Nations. Russia in fact pushed for this non-binding text to be put to a vote, which made it the most difficult Olympic truce to adopt.
This is a pure tradition invented by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at the time of the Bosnian war, to the extent that theekecheiria (“truce”) Greek was nothing other than an authorization given to pilgrims, including athletes, to move between the lines of enemy armies. Because ancient contests never gave rise to a suspension of hostilities, and even less to peace, which is a concept forged only in the IVe century.
The idea that sport could serve the cause of international peace was born in liberal pacifist circles at the turn of the 1880s. It was first expressed on November 14, 1891 by the British pacifist Hodgson Pratt, on the occasion from 3e International Peace Congress in Rome. And will be taken over a year later, on November 25, 1892, by a young Parisian aristocrat named Pierre de Coubertin.
Response to the Cold War
But, according to the founder of the IOC, this beautiful idea of “holy truce that the Greek nations agreed to contemplate youth and the future” was damaged from the first edition of the modern Games, in 1896, when Greek and American sporting nationalisms were expressed in the Athens stadium, and even more so when various governments intervened to support the sporting performance of their teams national, before 1914.
If, after the Second World War, the IOC praised the return of international peace through sport during the London Games in 1948, the respite would be short-lived. Four years later, in Helsinki, the Finnish organizers quietly mentioned the concept of an Olympic truce in response to the sporting cold war being fought between the USSR and the United States through athletes and the media.
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