Funny holidays - Day “The main thing is not victory, but participation”

During the 1908 Olympics, Bishop Ethelbert Talbot, speaking at a conference of Anglican priests in London, said: “The games themselves are better than the race and the reward. St. Paul tells us how little the reward means. Our reward is not that perishable, but that which is imperishable." Pierre de Coubertin was inspired by this sermon in honor of the Olympic participants. A couple of days later, at a government banquet, the IOC President will refer to the words of the bishop and formulate the famous “The main thing is not victory, but participation.” In honor of this phrase, a holiday was established, which is celebrated on July 19, the day of the announcement of E. Talbot’s sermon. The motto of the Olympic Games is the well-known “Faster, higher, stronger!”, approved in 1894. However, the words of a bishop from Pennsylvania, which were directly related to sports competitions, became unofficial. The main discipline at the 1908 Games was athletics. To please the Windsor family, who wanted to watch the runners from the balcony of their ancestral castle, the marathon rules were changed. The distance increased from 40 km, for which the athletes were preparing, to 42 km and 195 m. Italian Dorando Pietri became the marathon favorite 3 km before the finish. But due to the intense heat and the start at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the exhausted athlete lost his orientation, changing the direction of his run. The judges who turned him around had to lift the barely alive marathon runner from the ground four times and put him on his feet in the last 200 m of the distance. Pietri finished first, but his victory was contested by the US delegation, whose runner, John Hayes, received a silver medal. The Windsors realized the magnitude of the Italian runner's tragedy and presented him with a special cup as a token of gratitude at the awards ceremony. The story of the marathon runner shocked not only Olympic commentators and reporters, among whom was the writer, “father” of the famous detective Arthur Conan Doyle, but also Bishop Talbot. He allegorically expressed his sympathy for the athlete, mentioning in his sermon words from the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians. From that time on, the path of the expression “The main thing is not victory, but participation” began. With the help of this catchphrase, today they console children who have not achieved the desired heights in sports competitions, schoolchildren who did not become excellent students by the end of the school year. The phrase is also used in an ironic way, assessing the success of outsiders in a particular matter. Psychologists, commenting on the unofficial Olympic motto, confirm that mistakes are the most valuable life experience. Losing confirms that the person tried to achieve the goal and did not give up under the pressure of circumstances. Scientists are echoed by popular wisdom: “For one beaten, they give ten unbeaten.” After the incident at the Olympics, Dorando Pietri became incredibly popular, earning huge amounts of money for that time. He twice, in 1908 and 1909, defeated his counterpart John Hayes in the marathon races, but this, of course, did not help him return the gold medal of the Games. However, the triumph that Pietri won in front of tens of thousands of admired spectators confirmed the validity of the wise idea formulated by de Coubertin: “The main thing is not victory, but participation.”