President of the IOC from 1894 to 1896

The first President was a Greek. He was born in Ermoupolis, on the island of Syros, on 15 February 1835. The Regulations drawn up by Pierre de Coubertin stipulated that the President of the International Olympic Committee should be chosen from the country where the next Games were to be held.

Mr Vikelas was thus President from 1894 to 1896. He had no particular connection with sport when he came from Greece to represent the Pan-Hellenic Gymnastic Club at the Congress in Paris in 1894. The original idea was to stage the first Games in Paris in 1900, but Mr Vikelas was able to convince the Committee that they should be held in Athens in May 1896.

After the conclusion of the first Games, he devoted himself to the promotion and popularisation of general education, which he claimed was urgently needed in Greece.

With his erudition to which we owe a scholarly work on "Byzantine and Modern Greece", he combined a fertile and whimsical imagination which gave us "Louki Laras" and "Tales from the Aegean". He died in Athens on 20 July 1908.