Olympics Dbq

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  • Topic: International Olympic Committee, Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin
  • Pages : 2 (735 words )
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  • Published : April 12, 2012
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Olympics DBQ
There are many different factors that have shaped the modern Olympic movement from 1892 to 2002. It was originally revived so people of different races could interact with other people without conflict. They wanted to have a temporary time of international peace. This idea is expressed in Document 1. The author, Pierre de Coubertin, explains how the athletes are exported into other lands without any hostility. The author is credible because he is also the founder of the modern Olympic movement. However, many countries were motivated by political, social, and economical reasons. The reasons altered the competitiveness of the Olympics.

While the Olympic Games were originally revived to be the “true free trade of the future”, it was used by some countries to make political gains. Document 3 by Arnold Lunn emphasizes this statement by talking about how the Nazis thought that “a ski race was a competition”and “to prove that Nazism was better than democracy”. They stopped at nothing to try and achieve victory so they could try to prove their point. Politics also shaped the Olympics in 1952 because of the rivalry between the Soviets and the Americans. The Russians wanted to beat the US in anything and everything (Document 4). The sources of Documents 3 and 4 are credible because one was a British Olympic team official and the other was an actual US competitor. The competitor, Bob Matthias, felt the tension in Finland. There was always that one country that made the Olympics less peaceful and more competitive.

The Olympic Games were also influenced by social reasons. Women were rarely included in the Olympics. This is proven by Document 2 that states in the caption that 2 percent of athletes were women in the 1908 games. However, women have made progress since then. In the 1992 games, there were 29 percent women who competed in the games (Document 8). Another document that could’ve helped further emphasize this statistic is a graph that shows the...
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