The much-needed, complete biography of a man history has a tad too hastily remembered as the inventor of the modern Olympic Games.

This ambitious aristocrat, who founded the International Olympic Committee and designed its lucrative rings, partly usurped his own legend. A visionary, Pierre de Coubertin was also a misogynist, a colonialist... and Hitler's accomplice in organizing the 1936 Berlin Games. It was high time to the archives were reopened and his true story told. As an advocate for the beauty of sport and of the Olympic Games as its crowning glory, might he have sullied his own achievement out of opportunism? What remains of the Olympic ideal today?