Nobel Cubahiro (Rwanda) on Olympic Values for the 21st Century

July 11, 2012

There are three fundamental Olympic values: excellence, friendship, and respect.
Excellence means always trying your best. Striving for excellence is to encourage effort. Friendship encourages us to consider sport as a tool for mutual understanding among individuals and people from all over the world. Celebrating friendship develops harmony. Respect is accepting people’s differences. To demonstrate respect is to preserve human dignity.

Excellence promotes a concept of quality based on effort, not results. It encourages us to be the best we can be, achieving our personal dreams. Friendship inspires us to nurture human and personal connections and to become true world citizens. The value of respect comprises respect for oneself, one's body, others, for the rules and regulations, for sport and the environment.

The Olympic values are what give the world hope for a better future. They are the values that people across the world, young and old, rich and poor, believe in and strongly associate with the sustainability of the Olympics and the ongoing promotion of the alliance between sport, education, and culture.

Each value can be expressed through more than one principle. These core values are brought to life through the principles of humanism, universality, and the alliance between sport, education, and culture. The value of respect, for example, can be brought to life by behaviors that are humanistic, nondiscriminatory, or both. The fluid relationships that exist between the Olympic values and principles enable a number of powerful belief/behavior combinations that more precisely shape socially responsible actions and advance the mission of the Olympic Movement.

The creative way to realize the Olympic values in years ahead is to spread the information about Olympic values throughout the world. Each person in the world needs those values to be applied in his or her life for good success.

Secondly, national, continental, and international Olympic centers have to be created. The international one will gather people from all around the world for training for a specific time. They will learn the Olympic values and principles and how they can be incorporated in each sphere of life. The national ones will help teach citizens about those values and how they can be applied in their lives. The continental and national centers will be used to promote and enhance intercultural understanding through exchange of persons between different countries.

These values also have to be taught to prisoners, sick persons, and other persons in difficult moments because they can help them persevere.

These centers are needed because they will bring people of different levels of education together to be taught these values. The Olympic Museum and the International Olympic Academy are the institutions that provide information about Olympic values and principles. And not any person has access to them. We know that these values are important and have to be learned by each person in the world so that they can be applied in life’s sphere.
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