Personality’s All-Round Development and the Utopism of Coubertin’s Olympic Idea

Abstract

The paper presents the analysis of Coubertin’s utopian project of Olympiad’s rebirth, which was intended to be the means of humankind’s mental and physical rehabilitation and person’s all-round development. Today this idea is exploited as an ideological cover of the Olympic movement’s commercialization and dehumanization. In the course of the project realization a lot of negative aspects were revealed – of humanistic, organizing, moral-esthetic, economic and political character, which led to the consequences, antithetic to Coubertin’s intentions. As a result, today these issues have become the main subject of comprehensive cultural, sociological, psychological and philosophical research of modern sport and world Olympic movement. Using the method of anthropocultural analysis the authors of the paper revealed the main reasons and mechanisms of Coubertin’s idea’s transformation. On the basis of the analysis the authors have concluded that modern Olympic sport functions under the conditions of complete subordination to world businesses beyond moral laws, cultural values and principles of humanism. In terms of tough competition among sportsmen and national teams such phenomena as corruption, political blackmail and doping offense become widely spread.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s1p547