Both men saw sport and physical education as central to schooling, and when Coubertin visited Rugby in the 1880s – some years after Dr Arnold’s death – he saw first-hand how the two were connected.
According to Professor John A Lucas, the associate professor of physical education at Pennsylvania State University: “The figure of Dr Thomas Arnold is one of the most important and least understood personalities in the evolution of the modern Olympic Games.
“Dr Arnold was the single most important influence on the life and thought of Pierre de Coubertin.”
When he was headmaster of Rugby between 1828 and 1842, Dr Arnold implemented a number of educational reforms at the school, including the introduction of organised sport.
He saw sport as a means of improving people’s behaviour and encouraging strength of character. He famously once said: “The difference between one man and another is not mere ability, it is energy.”
Rugby already had a reputation for sporting achievement, being famous for its claim of inventing rugby. In the 1820s a boy from Lancashire called William Webb Ellis is reported to have picked up the ball during a game of soccer and run with it, thereby bringing about the birth of the new sport.
Coubertin first encountered Dr Arnold in the fictitious pages of Tom Brown’s School Days, the novel by Thomas Hughes which is set at Rugby. Influenced by what he had read, Coubertin dedicated much of his life’s work to studying Britain’s education system.
What he saw at Rugby is thought to have contributed to Coubertin’s Olympic dream. Under his guidance, in 1896 the first modern Olympic Games took place in Athens.
