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Comment by g15jv2dp | Hacker News Reader

He was also racist, misogynistic, and reactionary. Even his contemporaries found it too much. There are few sources in English but here is a French one https://www.france24.com/fr/sports/20240713-jeux-olympiques-... A little quote from the article:

> Dès les premiers jours, j'étais un colonialiste fanatique… Les races sont de valeur différente, et à la race blanche, d’essence supérieure, toutes les autres doivent faire allégeance.

> From the very first days I was a fanatical colonialist… Races are of different value, and to the white race, of superior essence, all others must swear allegiance.

> Le véritable héros olympique est, à mes yeux, l’adulte mâle individuel. Je n’approuve pas personnellement la participation des femmes à des concours publics

> The real Olympic hero, in my eyes, is the individual adult male. I personally do not approve of women participating in public competitions.

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That’s good to know but maybe immaterial to the point of the article; The part of the Olympics that remains is not of those views.

The guy praised eugenics [1] and admired Hitler [2]. You think that's not relevant to an article about how the Olympics are a "religion of perfection"? What kind of perfection do you think that was, exactly?

[1] Pierre de Coubertin, "L'Éducation anglaise," In: J.-M. Brohm, Pierre de Coubertin, le seigneur des anneaux, Homnisphères, 2008.

[2] Daniel Bermond, Pierre de Coubertin, Paris, Éditions Perrin, 2008, 429 p. (ISBN 978-2-262-02349-2)

Trying to apply current moral standards to historical people will leave you finding nothing but demons in history. If people have to be perfect for their creations to not be discarded, then almost all modern institutions which have survived for long time will be in danger.

Who's advocating for discarding the olympics? All I'm saying is that we shouldn't glorify this guy.

I’m not sure the article does glorify him. It does call out some shortcomings of his vision and even implementation of the games over the years. The entire point is to get better and move beyond where we are now (and where we were then.) The fact that we can decry his views is a testament that much of humanity has largely moved on from them.

Well, perfection and peace aren't part of what remains, either.

And it does give some context to what he might mean by "perfection" and "peace".

Yup, his idea of perfection is most certainly imperfect by our standards, why even try to dress it up? Are we going to extol the virtues of Margaret Sanger and John Money next?

And in 100 years people will criticize you as well.

What your generation did to the environment, biodiversity, the climate, will be offensive to them.

Maybe you said something in favor or against AI and that then backfires. Because if AI is used to dominate humanity tech people who made it possible will be the most hated.

Or who knows, maybe you ate an animal or used too many kWh in your house.

So the eugenist should get a pass because I myself may be criticized in the future? That's bonkers. Two wrongs don't make a right.

I think you need to take a hard look in history and see how popular belief eugenics was at one point. It doesn't make it better, but it means you can't use it as a point to completely describe a person and everything else they did.

Eugenics started by trying to transfer the lessons of selective animal breeding to people. IQ measurements had a connection with eugenics, and low IQ individuals were targetted... in the US.

We know IQ is inheritable but IQ is influenced by many factors like pollution and nutrition.

The approach was very pseudoscientific in nature.

I didn't say that, you did.

Then what was your point? Say it explicitly then, instead of speaking in riddles.

The point is that society transforms and the median person of today is the monster of tomorrow. Some more than others.

This is only a dozen years or so away from being a defense of Hitler.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, I guess?

It's pure hubris to assume you know what the concerns and cultural fads will be important to people of the future. You don't know what they'll care about any more than I do.

I wonder if you misread the parent comment? It sounds like you're in total agreement.

Abhorrent as those views are, in the context of his time they were more or less the accepted normal. Back then, women couldn't vote in France or most other countries he had visited/used for inspiration. On the contrary, feminists, rare as they were, were mocked.

Racism was prevalent, colonialism rampant. He was born 30 years before Hitler, and we all know his views and how popular they were among large parts of Europe and even elsewhere.

That doesn't excuse his views, but it contextualises them.

This is a take I agreed with, then I read about it, and behold, it isn't really true. While among the aristocrats and/or oligarchs, it was certainly the majority opinion (engenism, racism and pro-colonialism to clarify), it wasn't among the population. A lot of people fought against colonialism, in the first place religious people. And a majority didn't care.

> And a majority didn't care.

It's a bit hard to gauge the opinion of the masses, but jingoism was prevalent and a popular political stance to have, so I doubt the majority didn't care.

In any case, I didn't say those views were universal - just that they were normal and acceptable to have.

Belgium showed black people in a zoo until the 60s, and women did not have voting rights in “enlightened” Switzerland until 1971. Holier than thou attitudes in Europe are a product of fairly recent brainwashing.

Nonsense, British and French colonialism explicitly had "bringing civilisation to the savages" aspects to it.

> > The real Olympic hero, in my eyes, is the individual adult male. I personally do not approve of women participating in public competitions.

The modern Olympics organizers have taken this sentiment and updated it with a twist: women can participate but they may be forced to compete against any adult male who claims to be female.

Just as in de Coubertin's day, males are prioritized while women are demeaned.

Both articles are about an obsession with peak human performance, 150 years later women do not excel in this regard and are not represented in the records, only in their own category, an adjective, nothing has fundamentally changed except categorization to accommodate.

People appreciate it and the discipline involved, the context of “Olympic hero” based on what it aimed to showcase is still relevant today by that standard. That observation in and of itself is not misogyny.

The shooting competition got split into gendered competitions after the first woman won in 1992; women were then banned from competing in the formerly mixed event until 2000 when a separate women’s event was organized. https://olympics.com/en/news/zhang-shan-the-only-female-shoo...

way to go Zhang Shan, that seems tangentially relevant to the statement. Its own independent issue about the subsequent split, not changing anything about my statement in a scatterplot of all absolute records, and nothing to do with whether a statement in 1869 was misogyny.

Do you know who wins all the marathons?

People in wheelchairs. It's not even close. They have to put them in a different category from the, um, able-bodied people, so that the able-bodied can also win.

Are we sure? I think if you put able-bodied people on wheelchairs they'd win even harder.

Maybe not - they wouldn't have the higher arm-strength-to-weight ratio that wheelchair athletes have.

If it becomes official, there may be at least 3 who trained hard enough to get all the medals. Actually, can able-bodied person compete in paralympic that they have no inherent advantage?

You can't beat biology.

The world record for the women's 100m sprint was set in 1988 at 10.49s by Florence Joyner at 29. [0]

High school boys in the US easily beat those times. [1]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_athle...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_high_sch...

A very small subset of high school boys. I bet you’ve never run close to that time.

I don’t understand what point you are trying to make. Are you saying women should be exactly the same as men?

No, and that this observation is not misogyny.

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