Forerunners and revival
The first significant attempt to emulate the ancient Olympic Games was the L'Olympiade de la République, a national Olympic festival held annually from 1796 to 1798 in Revolutionary France. The competition included several disciplines from the ancient Greek Olympics. The 1796 Games also marked the introduction of the metric system into sport. In 1850 an Olympian Class began at Much Wenlock, in Shropshire, England. It was renamed the Wenlock Olympian Games in 1859, and continues today as the Wenlock Olympian Society Annual Games. Dr Brookes adopted events from the programme of the Olympics held in Athens in 1859 in to future Games. In 1866, a national Olympic Games in Great Britain was organized by Dr. William Penny Brookes at London's Crystal Palace.
Greek interest in reviving the Olympic Games began with the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821. It was first proposed by poet and newspaper editor Panagiotis Soutsos in his poem "Dialogue of the Dead", published in 1833. Evangelis Zappas, a wealthy Greek philanthropist, sponsored the first "Olympic Games" in 1859 which was held in an Athens city square. Athletes participated from Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Zappas paid for the restoration of the ancient Panathenaic Stadium so that it could host all future Olympic Games. The Panathenian stadium hosted the first in 1870 and a second in 1875.
In the search for a reason for the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), historian Baron Pierre de Coubertin theorized that the soldiers had not received proper physical education.[21] In 1890, after attending the Olympian Games of the Wenlock Olympian Society, Coubertin decided that a large-scale revival of the Olympic Games was achievable. Coubertin built on the ideas of Brookes and Zappas with the aim of internationally rotating the Olympic Games from country to country. He presented these ideas during the first Olympic Congress of the newly created International Olympic Committee (IOC). This meeting was held from June 16 to June 23, 1894, at the Sorbonne University in Paris. On the last day of the Congress, it was decided that the first multinational Olympic Games would take place two years later in Athens. The IOC was fully responsible for the Games' organization, and, for that purpose, elected the Greek writer Demetrius Vikelas as its first president
