General Concept
More generally, the term "Olympic spirit" is an oft-referred-to but perhaps vaguely defined concept associated with the Olympic Games. Some media equate it with Pierre de Coubertin's statement that "The important thing is not to win, but to take part", and view athletes who try their best but finish last as epitomising the "Olympic spirit". Thus the Agence France-Presse wrote: "True Olympic spirit is often found away from gold medallists with their agents and sponsorship deals -- it is found in its purest sense in those that come last." It cited Eric Moussambani, Paula Barila Bolopa, Abdul Baser Wasiqi, Pyambuugiin Tuul, Charles Olemus, Mala Sakonninhom, Luvsanlkhündegiin Otgonbayar, Mira Kasslin and Samia Hireche as incarnations of the Olympic spirit. In 2000, CNN published an article on Eric Moussambani entitled "Olympic spirit: Swimmer competes for love of sport". In 2008, a press officer with the Chilean Tennis Federation described Nicolás Massú as having "really demonstrated the Olympic spirit: the effort, the struggle, his refusal to give up".
Read more about this topic: Olympic Spirit
Famous quotes containing the words general and/or concept:
“To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain
physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.”
—Percy W. Bridgman (1882–1961)