Thomas Bach speaking at the event.
by Philip Barker
International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach has helped cut a cake to celebrate the 40th birthday of the Olympic Studies Centre (OSC) in Lausanne.
“The Olympic Studies Centre has promoted a deeper understanding of the Olympic values of the ideas of de Coubertin across the globe,” Bach said.
He was also quick to recall that de Coubertin had first suggested the concept of such a centre in the pre-war years.
“I believe a centre of Olympic studies would mean the preservation and progress of my work more than anything else,” Coubertin wrote in 1937.
“You can also see that education and the academic world was at the heart of the Olympic mission even before the Olympic Studies Centre had been created,” Bach told the audience.
ISOH was represented by President Christian Wacker, Secretary-General Markus Osterwalder and International Olympic Academy (IOA) Dean Kostas Georgiadis.
“The OSC is the relay station between the academic world society and the Olympic museum and it is really part of the legacy of Coubertin’s thoughts to the present day,” said International Pierre de Coubertin Committee President (CIPC) Stephan Wassong who also joined the gathering.
A small Olympic museum had existed at Mon Repos where the IOC then had its headquarters.
There were attempts to set up a similar institute in Germany immediately before the second world war.
In the post war years, IOC Chancellor Otto Mayer kept the idea of an Olympic museum alive at Mon Repos until the mid-1960s.
By this time, the International Olympic Academy had also been established.
Even so, it wasn’t until October 1982 that another ‘interim’ Olympic museum was opened at the Avenue Ruchonnet in the heart of Lausanne.
This incorporated a studies centre where documents and papers of the Olympic movement were opened to the public.
Although it occupied 200 square metres the whole undertaking, overseen by IOC member Raymond Gafner, was relatively modest.
The process of putting them into a digital format did not happen until later.
Meanwhile construction began on a new Olympic museum on the bank of Lake Geneva at Quai D’Ouchy.
In 1993, figure skater Katerina Witt lit a Flame at the opening ceremony and another era of Olympic history had begun.
The library and documentation centre were moved to the same site and now operate under the aegis of the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage which is responsible for the “international promotion and dissemination of Olympism.”
The collection holds IOC publications and historical archives dating back to 1894.
These are now housed beneath the Villa Centenaire, next door to the museum.
OSC director Maria Bogner estimates that the centre has fielded some 70,000 requests for information.
It has over 38,000 books, magazines and other material. At least 11,500 items are now available in digital format online.
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