皮埃尔-德-顾拜旦1863年1月1日出生于法国巴黎。作为一名贵族家庭的孩子，他接受了良好的教育，并对文学和历史产生了浓厚的兴趣。为了更好地为民众服务，顾拜旦拒绝了家人为他在军队中谋取的职们，还放弃了前程似锦的仕途之路。

Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, was born in Paris in 1863. His family originated in Normandy where he spent many of his summers in the family Chateau de Mirville, near Le Havre. He refused the military career planned for him by his family, as well as renouncing a promising political career. By the age of 24 he had already decided the aim of his life: he would help bring back the noble spirit of France by reforming its old-fashioned and unimaginative education system.

Coubertin, whose father was an artist and mother a musician, was raised in cultivated and aristocratic surroundings. He had always been deeply interested in questions of education. For him, education was the key to the future of society, and he sought the means to make France rise once more after its defeat in the war in 1870.
 
Coubertin was a very active sportsman and practiced the sports of boxing, fencing, horse-riding and rowing. He was convinced that sport was the springboard for moral energy and he defended his idea with rare tenacity.

It was this conviction that led him to announce at the age of 31 that he wanted to revive the Olympic Games. He made this announcement in a meeting at the Union of French Societies of Athletic Sports (USFSA), for which he was Secretary General. No one really believed him and his statement was greeted with little enthusiasm.

Coubertin, however, was not discouraged and on 23 June, 1894 he founded the International Olympic Committee in a ceremony held at the University of Sorbonne in Paris. Demetrius Vikelas from Greece became the first president of the IOC.

Two years later, in 1896, the first Olympic Games of the modern era were held in Athens. On that occasion Coubertin was elected the second president of the IOC and he remained president until 1925. Due to the 1st World War, Coubertin requested permission to establish the headquarters of the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was a neutral country.

On 10 April, 1915 the acts ensuring the establishment of the international administrative centre and archives of the modern Olympic movement were signed in the Town Hall of Lausanne.

In 1922, the IOC headquarters and the Museum collections were moved to the Villa Mon Repos in Lausanne and stayed there for the next 46 years.

Pierre de Coubertin also wanted to be seen as a pedagogue. All of his projects, including the Games, had the same aim in mind: to make men.

His definition of Olympism had four principles that were far from a simple sports competition:To be a religion i.e. to "adhere to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection"; to represent an elite "whose origins are completely egalitarian" and at the same time "chivalry" with its moral qualities; to create a truce "a four-yearly festival of the springtime of mankind"; and to glorify beauty by the "involvement of the philosophic arts in the Games".

It is clear that the concept of the Olympic Games is far from a simple sports competition. Pierre de Coubertin withdrew from the IOC and the Olympic Movement in 1925 to devote himself to his pedagogical work, which he termed his "unfinished symphony".

Pierre de Coubertin suddenly died of a heart attack on 2 September, 1937, in a park in Geneva, and thus his "symphony" remained unfinished. The city of Lausanne had decided to award him honorary citizenship of the city, but he died just prior to the ceremony.

大意：
顾拜旦是一个非常活跃的体育运动爱好者，练习过拳击、击剑、马术和划艇。他坚信体育运动是推动道德力量产生的工具，并用罕见的毅力捍卫了自己的这一观点。通过对历史的研究，顾拜旦希望奥林匹克运动会能再度举行。他认为这是每个人应当为之努力的理想。他相信把业余运动员召集在一起能够促进各国间的友好关系。正是基于这一信信念，顾拜旦在31岁时宣布他想复兴奥林匹克运动会。
顾拜旦在法国田径运动协会联合会的会议上宣布了这一决定，当时他是该组织的秘书长。但是没有人真正相信他，对他的倡议大家反应冷淡。然而顾拜旦并未泄气，1894年6月23日，他在巴黎索邦大学的一个典礼上成立了国际奥林匹克委员会。来自希腊的季米特里奥斯当选为国际奥林匹克委员会的第一任主席。
两年后的1896年，第一届现代奥林匹克运动会在雅典举行。那一次，顾拜旦当选为国际奥林匹克委员会的第二任主席，他担任这一职位一直到1925年。由于第一次世界大战的爆发，顾拜旦征得同意在中立国－瑞士的洛桑成立了国际奥林匹克委员会总部。1925年顾拜旦不再担任国际奥林匹克委员会的主席，投身到教育事业中，他称之为“未奏完的交响乐”。
1937年9月2日顾拜旦在日内瓦的一个公园里猝死于心脏病发作，他的“交响乐”也就仍然没有完成。洛桑市本已经决定授予顾拜旦“荣誉市民”称号，但他就在颁奖典礼之前去世了。遵照顾拜旦的遗愿，他的遗体被埋葬在洛桑，而他的心脏则单独埋在了古代奥林匹亚遗址附近的一座墓穴里。