Rugby School, Warwickshire

Rugby School and the modern Olympics

In 1908, when the Olympic Games came to Britain for the first time, rugby football was an Olympic sport. Many people know that it was at Rugby School where local boy William Webb Ellis first ran with the ball in 1823 and where the game of Rugby Football was born. But not so many people know that Rugby School was also a driving inspiration behind the man who founded the modern Olympic Games and introduced rugby as an Olympic sport for the first time - although The Independent did publish an article on this very topic in December 2008.

Rugby schoolboys re-enacting an early version
of the game for Blue Peter in February 2009

Rugby football made its Olympic debut in 1900 at the Games in Paris and it was also in Paris that it was last played as an Olympic sport in 1924. It is no coincidence that Paris hosted the first ever Olympic rugby match because the man responsible for including the game in the Olympics was Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

As well as being a keen rugby enthusiast, de Coubertin established the modern Olympic Games and created the body which organizes them, the International Olympic Committee. De Coubertin was born and bred in France but it was in Britain that he developed his passion for Rugby and at Rugby School where he found a major source of inspiration for his dream of universal amateur athletics.

De Coubertin was first and foremost an educationalist. In founding the modern Olympic Movement, de Coubertin's goal was to improve education all over the world through sport. The idea of using sport to transform the lives of young people, a principle enshrined in the Olympic Charter, is rooted in the grounds of Rugby School, which de Coubertin visited in 1883, and in the ideas of its legendary Head Master, Thomas Arnold. Historians and academics now agree that "Dr Arnold was the single most important influence on the life and thought of Pierre de Coubertin" .

The seeds of de Coubertin's mission to improve education may well have been sown when, as a boy of twelve, he read the novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays, in which Thomas Arnold and Rugby School are famously immortalised. Years later, when he had set out on his mission, de Coubertin visited Rugby and other British schools to see for himself the life he had read about in the pages of Thomas Hughes' novel.

Pierre de Coubertin

It was during these visits that de Coubertin developed his enthusiasm for rugby, a souvenir he took back with him to France, where he refereed the first domestic French club championship in 1892 and France's first international in 1906.

While visiting Rugby, de Coubertin was also deeply impressed by the unique emphasis placed on organised sport, following the educational reforms pioneered at Rugby School by Thomas Arnold. "Thomas Arnold", wrote de Coubertin in a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1892, "the leader and classic model of English educators, gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education. The cause was quickly won. Playing fields sprang up all over England."

What de Coubertin saw on the nation's school playing fields was that the strength of mind, self-confidence and spirit of fair play encouraged on the sports pitch survived in the lives of the players outside it.

Although de Coubertin described Arnold as “the founder of athletic chivalry”, there is no recorded evidence of Thomas Arnold’s interest in sport – beyond the introduction of the first gymnastic equipment at Rugby School in 1835. However, by the time de Coubertin visited Rugby – around forty years after his death - sport had been eagerly grafted on to Arnold’s philosophy by his disciples at Rugby and other British public schools where the emphasis was on delivering an all-round education. History does not tell us the precise point at which reality became myth. The fact that de Coubertin’s Arnold may have been a mythical construct does not change the fact that aspirations associated with his name were absorbed by the Olympic movement.

Throughout his life, de Coubertin, acknowledged the influence of Thomas Arnold and the schools he visited in Britain on his ideas. Recalling a ceremony at the ruins of Olympia in 1927, when the Greek Minister of Public Instruction unveiled a monument commemorating the restoration of the Olympic Games, de Coubertin wrote: "As he honoured me by recalling past events, my thoughts turned to Kingsley and Arnold, and to the chapel at Rugby where the great clergyman rests who was, as I see it, one of the founders of athletic chivalry".