POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sports Politics, Policy and Law
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1654715
This article is part of the Research TopicGeopolitics and Sports: From Sports Propaganda to SportswashingView all 4 articles
"The birth of the Association of European National Olympic Committees (AENOC) and its stakes during the 1960s to 1970s"
Provisionally accepted
- Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France
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The initiative to associate the European National Olympic Committees was launched in the 1960s by the French Olympic Committee and its president at the time, Count Jean de Beaumont. This project faced hesitations and difficulties when it came to realization. The International Olympic Committee, led by Avery Brundage, notably obstructed it, as he was concerned about not disrupting the overall governance of the Olympic Movement. These years marked the beginning of certain alliances, particularly European ones, within the IOC in response to Brundage's presidency. Indeed, for the IOC president, the initiatives of Onesti and Beaumont were aimed at targeting the presidency of the IOC. It was during this period that new institutional alliances emerged, with networks of men and women finding themselves at the heart of complex relational knots, continually hindered by opposing institutional forces and constantly energized by unique personal encounters. This highlights the emergence of new institutions, ideologies, and visions of Olympism that developed within the Olympic Movement and around the IOC, and sometimes against it. President Brundage viewed these initiatives from the National Olympic Committees as attempts to undermine the authority of the IOC. According to him, it is the IOC that represents and brings together all the NOCs, not the Permanent General Assembly of the NOCs or the General Assembly of the NOCs of Europe.
Keywords: Olympism, IOC, AENOC, History, Olympic Games
Received: 26 Jun 2025; Accepted: 12 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 LEFEVRE. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Florent LEFEVRE, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France
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