Carl Diem

Carl Diem (born June 24, 1882, Würzburg – December 17, 1962, Cologne) was a German sports administrator, and as Secretary General of the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympic Games, the chief organizer of the 1936 Olympic Summer Games.

He created the tradition of the Olympic torch relay when he organised the 1936 build-up event, and was an influential historian of sport, particularly the Olympic games.

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Diem was a middle- and long-distance runner as a teenager - unusual in a country where gymnastic-style athletics was fashionable, rather than what were known as "anglo-saxon" athletics. He showed an early gift for organizing, founding his first athletic club, called Marcomannia, in 1899. As a young man, Diem originally pursued a career in sales, but also began to write articles for sporting newspapers. At the age of twenty, he was hired by the German Sports Authority for Athletics (the Deutsche Sportbehörde für Athletik, or DSBfA), and a year later was elected to its board of directors. Diem was an ardent believer in the heroic Olympian ideal, and in the contributions that international sport could make to harmony between nations. In this regard, and many others, he was a fervent disciple of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee and father of the modern international Olympiad.

In 1906, Diem began his long Olympic career, leading the German contingent of athletes to the Athens games (for reasons that are not entirely clear, the German delegation actually entered the stadium first in the parade of athletes). In 1909, the games for the summer of 1912 were awarded to Stockholm, but the IOC made it clear that Diem and his fellow organizers could expect to hold the 1916 games in Berlin. In 1912 he initiated the award of the German Sports Badge, following the example of a Swedish award encountered during the Stockholm Olympics.

Diem threw himself into preparations for the 1916 games; his principal partner in this and most of his Olympic endeavors was Theodor Lewald, who would for many years be chairman of the German Olympic Committee. In the summer of 1914, Diem and Lewald were planning their spectacular 1916 Olympiad when World War I erupted; the Berlin games were subsequently cancelled. Diem enlisted in the German army and served in Belgium and France. He was wounded at St. Quentin, recovered, and fought at both Champagne and the Argonne.

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