Success Quote by Avery Brundage

Brundage’s line is a bid to launder the Olympics’ rougher realities through a flattering self-image: not just sport, but “fine athletics and fine art,” an institution fit for museums as much as stadiums. The repetition of “fine” is doing heavy work. It isn’t descriptive so much as aspirational, a word meant to elevate bodies into culture and competition into civilization. It’s also defensive. “For too long the world has failed to recognise” frames criticism as ignorance, not disagreement, positioning the Olympic Movement as misunderstood genius rather than a contested, political machine.

The context matters because Brundage wasn’t just any former athlete waxing poetic; he was the longtime IOC president whose tenure was defined by fierce amateurism, moral pageantry, and a reflexive insistence that the Games stand above politics even as they were drenched in it. When he invokes “fine art,” he’s reaching back to the Coubertin-era fantasy that athletics would redeem modern life, producing disciplined citizens and tasteful spectators. That’s the sales pitch: the Olympics as a total aesthetic experience, proof that physical excellence can be cultured, not crude.

The subtext is gatekeeping. “Fine” implies standards, curatorship, a hierarchy of taste. It’s a quiet rebuke to the messy forces circling the Games - nationalism, commerce, protest, professional money - and a reminder of who gets to define what counts as “art” and what counts as “athletics.” In Brundage’s phrasing, the Olympics aren’t merely an event; they’re a moral brand, demanding reverence.