38. Baron Pierre de Coubertin

Born on Jan.1,1863 in Paris, France, he was the French 1) _____ who was primarily responsible for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, after nearly 1500 years of abeyance(中止，暂搁). He was a founding member of the international Olympic Committee(IOC) and 2) _____ from 1896 to 1925.

As a republican born to the French aristocracy, a patriot with an internationalist’s outlook, and a child of the French defeats of 1871 yet a committed 3) _____, Coubertin struggled in his 20s to find a satisfying vocation. Inspired by study tours of British public schools and American colleges, he resolved 4) “_____a great educational reform,” embarking upon life-long 5) ___ for secondary school improvement, workers’ universities and the popular study of world political history. These efforts attained little success and are largely forgotten today. But as the reviver of the Olympic Games, Coubertin managed to 6) _____ modern cultural history on a global scale.

Coubertin’s extraordinary energies, his taste for cultural symbolism, his social and political 7) ____, and his willingness to exhaust his 8) _____ in pursuit of his 9) _____ were critical to launching the Olympic Movement. At the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition, Coubertin launched a series of congresses on physical education and international sport that coincided with inspiring new archaeological finds from Olympia. His public call for an Olympic revival at one of these congresses in 1892 fell on 10) _____, but he persevered and in 1894 a second Sorbonne congress resolved to hold an international Olympic Games in Athens.