Jiří Guth-Jarkovský

Jiří Guth-Jarkovský studied at Charles University in Praha, and received a Ph.D. from there in 1882. He later studied for three years at the Université de Genève. He held a number of teaching appointments and then served as Head of Protocol to Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, from 1919-25. Guth met Pierre de Coubertin on a visit to Paris in 1891 and was made the Bohemian representative at the 1894 Sorbonne Congress at which the Modern Olympics were resurrected and the International Olympic Committee was formed. Guth became one of the founding members of the IOC in 1894.

In 1899 Guth founded the Bohemian Olympic Committee which became known as the Austrian-Czech Olympic Committee in 1912. In October 1916, this committee was dissolved under political pressure and Guth was forced to issue a statement rescinding his IOC Membership. However, Guth never advised Lausanne of this decision, and remained on the IOC until 1943, fully 49 years. He was greatly responsible for Bohemia competing independently at the 1900, 1906, 1908, and 1912 Olympics. With the break up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I an independent Czechoslovakian State was established in 1918 and Guth established a Czechoslovakian Olympic Committee by December 1918. In 1939, after the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Germany, he remained on the IOC, but was termed the member from Bohemia-Moravia that year.

Guth served as secretary-general of the IOC (1919-23) and was appointed a member of the first Executive Committee in 1921 but in 1924 resigned to concentrate on organizing the 1925 IOC Session in Praha. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1928, wrote more than 20 books on a variety of subjects and translated the works of many famous authors, including René Descartes, Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. Born as Jiří Guth, he took the name Guth-Jarkovský in 1920 and sometimes wrote under the pseudonym, Stanislav Jarkovský.