War & Peace Quote by Juan Antonio Samaranch

Sport, in Samaranch's telling, isn’t a pastime stapled onto school life; it’s the civic glue. The sentence is engineered to sound inevitable: “inalienable” borrows the moral authority of human-rights language, smuggling athletics into the same category as education itself. That’s not an accident. As the long-serving IOC president, Samaranch spent decades selling the Olympics as a force above politics while constantly negotiating with politics. This line works like Olympic branding at its sleekest: elevate the product, launder the mess.

The intent is clear: justify institutional power. If sport is “part of the educational process,” then Olympic sport isn’t merely entertainment or commerce; it becomes a public good, something governments, schools, and taxpayers are expected to support. The promised outcomes - “peace, friendship, cooperation and understanding” - form a familiar quartet of soft diplomacy. Notice what’s missing: money, nationalism, scandal, and coercion. The list is aspirational enough to be hard to dispute and vague enough to be unfalsifiable.

The subtext is a rebuttal to criticism that major sporting events inflame rivalry, bankroll corruption, or serve authoritarian image-making. Samaranch’s era was defined by Cold War boycotts, debates over amateurism, and the Olympics’ full-speed shift into corporate spectacle. Framed this way, the Games aren’t a global TV business with flags; they’re an educational mission that happens to require stadiums, sponsors, and state cooperation.

It’s persuasive because it flatters the audience: if you love sport, you’re not just a fan. You’re participating in peace.