Abstract - Are Olympic games something more than sport?
Summary1
An opinion pointing out that the Olympic Games are something more than sport - popularized at symposia, conferences and in polemics during meetings of Polish and foreign representatives of social sports sciences may raise legitimate doubts, especially when it is referred to their modern, contemporary form initiated by baron Pierre de Coubertin.
Admittedly, the Olympic Games are a very important multi-sports event. However, they are not the most important from the viewpoint of such sports as, for example, football, professional boxing, ground tennis, rugby, golf, cricket, baseball, American football, women's modern pentathlon or at least some hundred of Far Eastern martial arts, and a huge number of those which have not been placed in the program of the Games. From that viewpoint, the Olympic Games are not anything more than sport too, since they do not fulfil expectations of competitors and other persons connected with the pointed out sports. They embrace neither sport as a whole, nor all expectations connected with it. They are only its smaller or - dependently on opinions - greater fragment.
1 The paper prepared within the framework of the statutory research Ds.-106 “Social and Cultural Values of Sport”, financed by the Ministry of Science and University Education.