Sports, the Olympic Movement and the Olympic Programme

The Olympic Programme is composed by several events, from different sports, and composes the most prominent features of the Olympic Games (McLaughlin & Torres, 2011). The selection of sports which will illustrate the values of Olympism every four years to a worldwide audience should be made in accordance to the same philosophy, and a way to do it is to look for each sport as a set of rules and values. The aim of this essay is to address the following question: does the multiculturalism of the Olympic Programme represent the universalism propagated by the Olympic Movement? To this end, it is presented in this work the role of rules in sports, the universalism of the Olympic Movement, and the multiculturalism of the Olympic Programme. As result, it also suggests a new method of selecting sports to compose the Olympic Programme, based on the accordance of each sport's rules and values to the universalism proposed by Olympism.