The idea had a complicated gestation. In 1938, two men proposed establishing an Olympic education center in Greece: Carl Diem, a prominent figure in the German sports movement, and Ioannis Ketseas, an IOC member. Their proposed model was the Institute of Olympic Studies in Berlin. The timing was catastrophically wrong. World War II ended further discussion before it could begin. A decade later, in 1949, the IOC approved a revised version of Ketseas's proposal. The Academy acquired a legal identity as a Hellenic Olympic Committee commission in 1955, and the first session was finally held in 1961, sixty-five years after the first modern Games and twenty-four years after Coubertin's death. That first session was hosted, literally, under tents. Some things in Greece have always started humbly.

The IOA is located near the archaeological site of ancient Olympia in the western Peloponnese — not in the ruins themselves, but close enough that the pine-shaded landscape of the ancient sanctuary is a constant reference point. The campus holds a 500-seat auditorium, a 250-seat presentation room, five classrooms, dormitories ranging from single rooms to eight-person shared quarters, a restaurant, and a library with more than 16,000 book titles focused on the Olympic movement, sports history, and the philosophy of sport. It is both conference center and retreat, designed for sustained study rather than tourist visits. The physical proximity to ancient Olympia is not accidental — it is the whole point. Olympism, in de Coubertin's conception, was a philosophy rooted in a place.

The IOA began with a single program: the International Session for Young Participants, inaugurated in 1961 under those original tents and eventually growing to 210 participants annually. Over the following decades, new programs accumulated: a seminar for sports journalists (1986), a session for National Olympic Academy directors (1987), sessions for NOC officials and presidents (1992), programs for educators and postgraduate students in physical education (1993), and a session specifically for Olympic medalists (2007). In total, more than 80,000 people have attended IOA congresses and seminars, with over 20,000 participating in the official Sessions. In partnership with the University of Peloponnese and with support from the John Latsis Foundation, the IOA also offers a two-year international postgraduate degree program in Olympic Studies.

One of the IOA's intended functions was to seed a global network of Olympic education. It worked. Participants returned home from sessions in Olympia and started talking — organizing meetings, giving speeches, publishing accounts of what they had encountered. Those conversations eventually crystallized into National Olympic Academies around the world, encouraged under IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch as a way to extend the Olympic cultural mission beyond its Greek center. Otto Simitzek, the IOA's dean for over thirty years, described the relationship as one of coordination between a parent institution and its distributed offspring. The model recognized that Olympism could not spread by headquarters alone — it needed local voices, local institutions, local investment in the idea.

What exactly is Olympism? The question sounds philosophical and a little abstract, which is exactly what makes it hard to keep alive inside an institution that also has to manage finances, program schedules, and conference logistics. De Coubertin's vision was ambitious: a movement that joined athletic excellence with intellectual and ethical development, that saw sport not as entertainment or nationalism but as a form of human education. Whether the IOA fully embodies that vision or merely keeps its memory is a question the Academy itself debates. But the fact of its existence, in this particular place — walking distance from where ancient athletes swore their oaths before a statue of Zeus — gives the question a gravity it would not have anywhere else. Some arguments are better conducted with ruins nearby.