Mere Fidelity: The Olympics and Sport, with Michael Austin

Philosopher Michael Austin joins us to discuss the Olympics, sport, and whether we should watch any of it anyway. Austin is the editor of a variety of volumes on philosophy and sport, is a frequent writer at Psychology Today, and is a professor at Eastern Kentucky University.

The excerpt Alastair read is below, and is taken from this article:

In their beliefs, Coubertin and his followers were liberals in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill. Deeply suspicious of conventional theistic religions, they promoted Olympism as a substitute for traditional faith. “For me,” Coubertin wrote in his Mémoires Olympiques, “sport is a religion with church, dogma, ritual.” In a radio address delivered in Berlin on August 4, 1935, he repeated his frequently expressed desire that the games be inspired by “religious sentiment transformed and enlarged by the internationalism and democracy that distinguish the modern age.” Nearly thirty years later, Coubertin’s most dedicated disciple, Avery Brundage, proclaimed to his colleagues on the International Olympic Committee that Olympism is a twentieth-century religion, “a religion with universal appeal which incorporates all the basic values of other religions, a modern, exciting, virile, dynamic religion” (pp. 2-3).