John Astley Cooper

John Astley Cooper (* 1858 in Adelaide , † 1930 in England ) was a clergyman of the Anglican Church and inventor of today's Commonwealth Games .

In 1891, Astley Cooper called in the imperial newspaper Greater Britain (London) to hold regular sporting competitions for the entire British Empire , embedded in Empire exhibitions. Scholarships for particularly talented people from the Empire should also be connected with this (this later became the Rhodes Scholarship ). Public discussion in the leading English newspapers gave rise to the idea of holding the Pan-British Olympic Games every four years . The historian James Anthony Froude had the term the Olympic Games in this context brought into the discussion, which wanted to tie in with the classic educational tradition and above all to address the students.

Since Pierre de Coubertin , who was responsible for French university sports, feared that he would be excluded from this event with his French athletes, he opposed the world-wide Olympic Games. Since Astley Cooper did not come from the sports movement, limiting participation to amateurs was not important to him. Coubertin linked his games with the amateur sports associations. With the spread of the Astley Cooper Committees, the Olympic Games had participants from Australia from the start. However , Astley Cooper rejected the 1908 London Olympics because he was willing to accept Americans (as citizens of former British colonies) at his games, but not athletes from around the world.

Six months after Astley Cooper's death, the first British Empire Games were held in Hamilton in 1930 , based on his preparatory work.

literature

• Arnd Krüger (1986): Was John Astley Cooper the inventor of the modern Olympic Games? In: Louis Burgener u. a. (Ed.): Sport und Kultur , Vol. 6. Bern: Lang, 72 - 81.
• Katharine Moore (1989): One Voice in the Wilderness: Richard Coombes and the promotion of the pan-britannic festival concept in Australia 1891-1911, in: Sporting Traditions pp. 188-203. http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/SportingTraditions/1989/st0502/st0502f.pdf
• Katharine Moore (1989): 'The warmth of comradeship': the first British empire games and imperial solidarity, in: The International Journal of the History of Sport 6: 2, 242-251.
• Katharine Moore (1991): A neglected imperialist: the promotion of the British empire in the writing of John Astley Cooper, in: The International Journal of the History of Sport 8: 2, 256-269.