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Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: International Olympic Committee
International Olympic Committee
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International Olympic Committee
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The International Olympic Committee IOC was formed in 1896 to govern the organization and development of what were understood to be a modern version of the Greek Olympic Games.
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Its first president was Dimitros Vikalas, a Greek, and its secretary was Frenchman Pierre de Kubertan.
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De Kubertan's energy and his vision have been the true inspiration behind the modern Olympic movement.
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The IOC has effectively governed the Olympic movement for over 100 years.
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However, that period of time has seen many conflicts and controversies within the IOC and in the Olympic movement as a whole.
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At first, the main obstacle the Kubertan faced to creating an International Olympic movement was the lack of organization of sport internationally.
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Early sports organizations, most of them amateur, had trouble organizing their own sports and leagues nationally.
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As a result, cooperating with the IOC internationally was an extreme challenge.
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In the early years, De Kubertan's own vision for the Games dictated much of the IOC's policies and procedures.
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His prejudices also influenced the movement.
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For example, De Kubertan was adamant in his rejection of female athletes participation in the Games.
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An embodiment of Victorian ideals and prejudices, De Kubertan thought women's place was in the home and bearing and raising children.
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Indeed, he thought of women's competition as unnatural and moral and indecent.
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As a result of De Kubertan's powerful position within the IOC, it would take many years to have women participating in any significant way.
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The IOC has always claimed a hands off approach to political struggles and controversy surrounding the Games, claiming now for over 100 years that the IOC is not a political organization and that the sport, in its purest sense one represented best by the IOC of course, is inherently nonpolitical.
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The IOC has always had trouble answering critics who point out obvious exceptions to the claim.
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At the simplest level, the act of competing under national flags, something the IOC encourages, is a political event.
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At a higher political level, the Olympic Games have been used for political demonstrations through boycotts, and the Olympic movement was probably the most visible means of symbolically fighting the Cold War.
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The post of World War 2 years were lean ones from the Olympic movement.
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The IOC and hosting cities and nations often had trouble breaking even.
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At its worst, the games went into great financial debt, most notoriously in the Summer Games in Montreal in 1976.
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However, since that time, the Games have taken a more market friendly approach, encouraging private sponsorship and negotiating massive television contracts with networks around the world, especially those in the USA.
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As a result, the IOC is a much more financially solvent organization than it was a few decades ago.
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However, it is not clear that the IOC is following its founder's original plan for the movement.
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After all, the Cooper Tan was a pure amateur at heart.
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The current commercially oriented Olympics would make the Cooper Tan concern, to say the least.