Pierre de Coubertin

About Pierre de Coubertin

Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937) was a French educator and historian whose most significant historical contribution was the revival and modernization of the Olympic Games. He is credited as the founder of the modern Olympics, leading to the first modern Games in Athens in 1896. This foundational role in establishing one of the world's most recognized global sporting and cultural events secures his high placement at #746 in MIT's Pantheon ranking of historically important figures.

Despite his influence, Coubertin experiences a notable historical attention gap online. His Wikipedia page accrued only 139K annualized views in 2025, placing him significantly underattended relative to his importance, indicated by a $-2 ext{x}$ attention gap. For context, his low visibility compares unfavorably to others in the broader business/cultural sphere: Warren Buffett (\#890 importance) garnered $3.6 ext{M}$ views, while Oskar Schindler (\#963 importance) attracted $1.4 ext{M}$ views in the same year. Coubertin's current internet footprint is less than $4\%$ of Buffett's, despite a higher historical rank.

This disparity is compounded by declining recent interest. Coubertin's pageviews showed a substantial year-over-year decline of $-58.5\%$, and his quarterly momentum fell by $-16\%$ between Q1 and Q3 of 2025, suggesting that attention to the founder of the global sporting movement is significantly waning in the modern digital sphere.