皮埃尔-德-顾拜旦1863年1月1日出生于法国巴黎。作为一名贵族家庭的孩子，他接受了良好的教育，并对文学和历史产生了浓厚的兴趣。为了更好地为民众服务，顾拜旦拒绝了家人为他在军队中谋取的职们，还放弃了前程似锦的仕途之路。
Pierre Frédy, Baron1 de Coubertin, was born in Paris in 1863. His family originated in Normandy where he spent many of his summers in the family Chateau2 de Mirville, near Le Havre. He refused the military career planned for him by his family, as well as renouncing3 a promising4 political career. By the age of 24 he had already decided5 the aim of his life: he would help bring back the noble spirit of France by reforming its old-fashioned and unimaginative education system.
Coubertin, whose father was an artist and mother a musician, was raised in cultivated and aristocratic surroundings. He had always been deeply interested in questions of education. For him, education was the key to the future of society, and he sought the means to make France rise once more after its defeat in the war in 1870.
Coubertin was a very active sportsman and practiced the sports of boxing, fencing, horse-riding and rowing. He was convinced that sport was the springboard for moral energy and he defended his idea with rare tenacity6.
It was this conviction that led him to announce at the age of 31 that he wanted to revive the Olympic Games. He made this announcement in a meeting at the Union of French Societies of Athletic7 Sports , for which he was Secretary General. No one really believed him and his statement was greeted with little enthusiasm.
Coubertin, however, was not discouraged and on 23 June, 1894 he founded the International Olympic Committee in a ceremony held at the University of Sorbonne in Paris. Demetrius Vikelas from Greece became the first president of the IOC.
Two years later, in 1896, the first Olympic Games of the modern era were held in Athens. On that occasion Coubertin was elected the second president of the IOC and he remained president until 1925. Due to the 1st World War, Coubertin requested permission to establish the headquarters of the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was a neutral country.
On 10 April, 1915 the acts ensuring the establishment of the international administrative8 centre and archives of the modern Olympic movement were signed in the Town Hall of Lausanne.
In 1922, the IOC headquarters and the Museum collections were moved to the Villa9 Mon Repos in Lausanne and stayed there for the next 46 years.
Pierre de Coubertin also wanted to be seen as a pedagogue10. All of his projects, including the Games, had the same aim in mind: to make men.
His definition of Olympism had four principles that were far from a simple sports competition:To be a religion i.e. to "adhere to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection"; to represent an elite11 "whose origins are completely egalitarian" and at the same time "chivalry12" with its moral qualities; to create a truce13 "a four-yearly festival of the springtime of mankind"; and to glorify14 beauty by the "involvement of the philosophic15 arts in the Games".
It is clear that the concept of the Olympic Games is far from a simple sports competition. Pierre de Coubertin withdrew from the IOC and the Olympic Movement in 1925 to devote himself to his pedagogical work, which he termed his "unfinished symphony".
Pierre de Coubertin suddenly died of a heart attack on 2 September, 1937, in a park in Geneva, and thus his "symphony" remained unfinished. The city of Lausanne had decided to award him honorary citizenship16 of the city, but he died just prior to the ceremony.
