Revisionist publicity by county Olympians

LETTER - Your report on August 1 regarding Dr William Penny Brookes's entry in the 2008 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as the person "credited for re-lighting the Olympic flame" is the latest example of the Wenlock Olympian Society's attempt to re-write Olympic history.

This follows your report on July 11 of Lord Coe's visit to Much Wenlock when you reported that he hailed Wenlock as the "home" of the modern Games. Your reports are consistent with the society's claim that Brookes was the "founding father of the modern Olympic Games".

The only person entitled to be regarded as the architect of the modern Olympics is the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin. It is true that Brookes created an Olympic Games in Wenlock long before de Coubertin was born. It is also true that over several years there was contact between the two men. De Coubertin's idea of a worldwide Olympics was conceived early in his life.

In about 1884, some years before his first contact with Brookes, he commenced working towards the institution of that goal. De Coubertin travelled widely.

The greatest impression made upon him was the English interest in sports and games, particularly those he saw at English public schools. While on a visit to Britain in 1889 he was contacted by Brookes and so the dialogue between the two men began, as it had already done so between de Coubertin and many other people.

My own interest in the Olympics, particularly the athletics, began in 1952. Any literature which I read in the ensuing years always attributed the founding of the Olympics to de Coubertin.

Although born and bred in Shropshire, it was many years later before I learned of the Wenlock Games. However, it appears to me it is only in comparatively recent times that claims have been made that Brookes was the real architect of the modern Games.

I do not doubt that Brookes had in his mind a worldwide Olympics. So did others. But it was only de Coubertin who possessed the diplomacy, determination and organisational skills to bring those dreams together and achieve the establishment of the Games.

In the Sorbonne on June 23, 1894, he created the International Olympic Committee, which led to the inaugural Games in 1896.

He would have achieved this without there ever having been any contact between Brookes and him.

To say Brookes was the founding father of the Olympics is equivalent to saying Marie Curie's laboratory assistant discovered radium. It concerns me that the Wenlock Society's revisionism, although not fooling everybody, may mislead others, particularly the young in the run-up to 2012, into believing the claim.

Let us not, as genuine lovers of the Olympics, taint not only that movement but also the undoubted work of an enlightened and philanthropic Shropshire doctor by the creation of a myth and irreversibly carving it in tablets of stone. The credit for the revival of the Games can only be attributed to one man - Pierre de Frédi, Baron de Coubertin.

Hugh S Haycocks, Muxton