sport

sport has been defined by a UNESCO Committee as: ‘Any physical activity which has the character of play and which involves a struggle with oneself or with others, or a confrontation with natural elements’. They added ‘If this activity involves competition, it must then always be performed in a spirit of sportsmanship. There can be no true sports without the idea of fair play.’ The UK Sports Council in 1992 stated; ‘We know that sport can make a positive contribution to national morale, health and the economy. We believe that it can enhance community spirit, equality of opportunity, personal development and social integration.’ Over 150 activities are recognized by the Sports Council as sports, and a line has been drawn to the exclusion of chess, as a game, not a sport.

The origins of sport in general lie in their practice for combat and war. Fencing is depicted on Egyptian murals from the time of the pyramids; appropriately, sabre and foil are two of only fifteen disciplines included in every modern Olympic Games since 1896.

Robert Dover codified English country sports into his celebrated Dover's Cotswold Olimpicks, in 1612, almost certainly attended by Shakespeare, which continued until 1853. Baron de Coubertin had his idea to found a modern Olympics partly from his attendance at the similar Much Wenlock Olympics in Shropshire. Both these festivals run today. The equivalent sports festivals in Scotland are the Highland Games. In both countries from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries local girls and women of all ages ran footraces at country fairs for holland smocks, or shifts — the ‘smock races’. In Scotland also, during nearly 200 years from the Peace of Glasgow in 1502 to the Revolution of 1688, every reigning monarch of the Stuart line, including Mary Queen of Scots, played golf — a sport which has been played on the moon.

The ancient Olympic Games were religious festivals which commenced with a procession along the sacred way, the Pompike Othos, followed by sacrifice and oath-taking. The athletes were all men and competed naked, and only one woman was permitted to spectate, a priestess of Demeter, the Goddess of earth and harvests. The Komos was the ceremonial crowning of the victors with olive leaves on the fifth day, after which they returned in triumph to greater wealth and status in their city states. The Olympic Games were primarily occasions to honour Zeus, but their origins are to be found long before the Greeks came to the Mediterranean. Although the first Games are reputed to have been held in 776 bc, the site was occupied a thousand years earlier. After 293 celebrations, Emperor Theodosius banned them in ad 393, ostensibly for corruption and professionalism, but essentially because as a converted Christian he disapproved of their pagan associations. An idea of such festivals may be gained in the Duveen gallery of the British Museum, from the frieze which originally decorated the Parthenon. The modern Games, and many other major sports festivals, follow a similar format.

The major change in modern sport (apart from the expansion of women's participation) is the massive impact of money and professionalism. It is reported that the American television network NBC has paid $3.4 billion for certain future Olympic rights, and on a lesser scale this is happening throughout particular sports, aided by lottery and other funding. This is not entirely new: many of the ancient Greek Olympians had their training expenses paid and subsistence provided, and although there were no money prizes at the Games, nevertheless, the champions could look forward to major material rewards back in their city states. The concept of amateurism in Britain arose as a means of preventing the working classes from competing against the aristocracy. As late as the 1930s physical education teachers were considered professional athletes and thus ineligible for the Olympics. An important change in Britain has been much better subsistance finance (mainly lotttery funding) for full-time training for selected athletes. At the Sydney Olympics 28 medals (and ten 4th places) vindicated this policy.

Rules of the games

It is axiomatic that sport is played to rules, which are formed to establish equality. Sports sociologist Alan Tomlinson has commented: ‘Sports … are contested in theoretically equal terms: they are increasingly specialized; they are based upon officially drawn-up rules and extraordinarily sophisticated approaches to them; they are run by organizational personnel; they are measured in unprecedentedly detailed ways; and they stress the unsurpassable, the far horizon, the stretching of limits.’ Regarding the measurement of such limits, when Said Aouita officially beat David Moorcroft's 5000 metres world record of 13.00.41 by 0.01 seconds — or 0.0013%, the current author wondered if the track itself was measured with comparable accuracy. By contrast, 0.01 of a second would be an acceptable 0.01% of the 100 metre world record time of 9.79. But beyond the rules there are also meta-rules, unwritten systems of conventions which embed the rules in a value system, signalled by victory award ceremonies or football team celebrations. A bowler, bowling a grubber to prevent a winning run being scored, defies the conventions of cricket, but not its rules. When Oliver McCall refused to fight Lennox Lewis in the boxing ring in Las Vegas in 1997, he defied not the rules, but the conventions. And sport is often powerless against those who defy its conventions.

The requirements of modern sport

The requirements of modern sport can be considered in terms of the total expert input into a National Team or Olympic Squad (although a much scaled down version is applicable to the preparation of a Saturday primary school team). Many areas of expertise are needed:

Specialist equipment

advances continually. The ‘shovel blade’ in rowing, and the ‘wing paddle’ in canoeing, both gave significant advantages when first introduced. It was noted that a marathoner running at 322 metres per minute (around 2 hours 10 minutes) needed 62 ml of oxygen per kg per minute with a then conventional shoe, but only 60.8 ml at the same speed with an air-soled shoe. An aerodynamic, low profile, smaller wheeled, helium-tyred, lighter bicycle (5.9 kg compared to conventional 8.1 kg) reduces drag by about 7%, giving a 5 second advantage over 4000 metres at 50 kph. From 1940–60 the pole vault world record improved by 23.5 cm, but in the next twenty years it improved by over 100 cm — mainly by improvements in the pole itself. Modern rackets in tennis and squash have increased ball speed. The Formula 1 Grand Prix car has changed out of all recognition in the past thirty years — and so on.

Technical and motor skills

have also vastly improved, due to education of coaches regarding motor skill learning and also to detailed biomechnical analysis, in sports ranging from gymnastics to the football free kick. As a biomechanist, Dick Fosbury won Olympic gold and set a high jump record by realizing that, as the centre of gravity of the body is nearer the back than the front, it made more sense to go over the high jump bar on his back, thus not needing to lift the centre of gravity quite as high, for the same height of jump. Hence the ‘Fosbury Flop’ — although it needed the technology of the raised foam landing area. Not all technical improvements are feasible; for example a new javelin technique was perfected whereby the thrower greased the javelin tail, held it initially in the middle, and span like a discus thrower before release. Use of the technique immediately led to throws beyond the then world record, but the accuracy was too uncertain for use in stadia.

Tactical innovations

and identification of weaknesses in the opposition have been assisted by videotaping and notational analyses especially of the ‘invasion’ team games, from rugby to camogie, and of the racket sports.

Sports psychology

plays a major part in most modern competition at high level, in a variety of ways, ranging from stress handling and motivation, to acceptance of defeat and of injury.

Sports nutrition and biochemistry

are vitally important, with techniques such as carbohydrate loading for muscle glycogen boosting now standard, the importance of maintaining fluid balance being recognized in a wide variety of sports, the use of creatine supplements benefitting short term anaerobic work, and promising innovations being made regarding amino acid supplementation.

Sports medicine

(including physiotherapy and podiatry) is, of course, vital, not just to help treat or even prevent injury, but also in areas such as sports amenorrhoea, due to too high volume training, which may lead into, or already be part of, the deadly triad of amenorrhoea, osteoporosis (with its sports risk of stress fractures), and eating disorders.

Team selection

is obviously of major importance and team management is no longer a perk for a long-serving official, but a full-time high profile job demanding a broad range of managerial, organizational, and personal skills.

Physical fitness

which falls into six components:(i) aerobic (cardiorespiratory) fitness — or ‘stamina’, dependent on maximal oxygen uptake, and what percentage of that maximum may be sustained during the sport, as assessed by techniques of ‘anaerobic threshold’, ‘critical power’, or the more recent ‘lactate minimum’ analysis;(ii) local muscle endurance (often, somewhat inaccurately, called anaerobic fitness), assessed in terms of peak power output (in watts), time to peak power, rate of fatigue, total work done (in kJ), and rate of recovery;(iii) muscle strength (increasingly measured on isokinetic dynamometers, to assess the force output at the contraction velocity required in the sport);(iv) muscle speed itself — often combined with muscle force to provide a measure of power;(v) flexibility; and(vi) body composition, in terms of the percentage of body fat.

Some sports, such as marathon running or sea swimming, require very high levels of fitness in just one or two areas; others, such as gymnastics, dance, and some martial arts, require high levels in almost all of them. Each sport requires an individual fitness profile and, as each competitor is different, this usually requires subtly different emphases within the training cycles. Analysis of the fitness components must always be the basis of training advice to coach and to competitor.

Sports science

is now a major feature of competition. Yet the author competed in athletics in the late 1940s and 50s, and in those days of no tracksuits, we ran in winter with newspaper down the front of our vests, and had a squirt of methylated spirits onto the back of our pharynx at the end of the training run; we changed in a ‘steamie’ attached to a public baths, and washed ourselves in its iron tubs — always with a ‘rub-down’ from an old trainer. A club member vulcanized pieces of car tyre treads onto our ex-army 30p thin-soled black plimsoles; yet on this regimen, the club, from inner-city Glasgow, won the English National Senior Cross-Country Championship and provided a string of international and Olympic team members.

Sport and health

A very large number of people engage in sport, or exercise, for the benefits of ‘health-related fitness’, with a major rise in recent years of jogging and aerobics. Sir Phillip Sydney Smith in the seventeenth century said ‘You will never live to my age except you retain your breath through exercise and your heart through joyfulness’, and famous exercise epidemiologists, Jerry Morris and Ralph Paffenbarger, have provided a very firm modern foundation for the belief that exercise is a major factor in the prevention of coronary heart disease. Aristotle (384–22 bc) pertinently observed that ‘Men may fall into ill-health as a result of hypo-activity.’ On the other hand, Hippocrates (469–399 bc) observed that ‘Health is at risk when exercise is at very high levels’, and indeed, ‘Sport for All’ implies sports injuries for all. This has long been recognized: the Scottish Maitland Folio Manuscript of 1582 (transcribed into modern English) has:Bruised muscles and broken bones
Strife, discord and spoiled bairns
Twisted in age and lame withall,
These are the beauties of football.

Sport and age

The oldest Olympic medallist was Swedish shooter, Oscar Swahn winning silver in 1920 aged 72. The oldest woman Olympian was 70-year-old Hilda Johnstone at Munich. Youngest known competitor was a 10-year-old Greek gymnast in 1896, and youngest individual medallist was Danish woman breast-stroker Inge Sorensen in 1936, at just 14. Of course, many sports now have Master's national and even world championships. In athletics, for example, these have age categories extending into the mid-90s. Norwegian Herman Smith-Johannsen was still skiing Nordic style into his eleventh decade, and George Stelback of USA was still golfing at 106. A recent Himalayan expedition had an average age of over 70, and in the final of the 1996 world indoor athletics championsips, Yekaterina Podopayeva, aged 42, just beat Mary Decker-Slaney, 38, in a thrilling 1500 metres final. Sandy Neilson swam 100 m freestyle in 58.59 s to win Olympic Gold at 17, 23 years later she swam the distance in 58.87 s, and just failed to make the USA Atlanta team.

Ergogenic aids and doping

A cynic has suggested that the difference between ergogenic work-producing aids, and doping, is that doping works. Perhaps the most bizarre such aid was the East German experimentation with rectal insufflations of air to optimize the buoyancy of swimmers; and among the most controversial — and most popular — is the use of altitude as an ergogenic aid to training. Doping itself is not new, e.g. the 1904 marathon winner Thomas Hicks was given multiple doses of strychnine and brandy while he was running! Just before the men's 100 metres in 1920, the US coach gave his men a mixture of sherry and raw eggs. Aids like that are harmless enough, but in 1960 the Danish cyclist Knut Jensen died during the Olympic road race, having taken amphetamines (which interfere with heat dissipation) and nicotinyl tartrate. Full scale Olympic doping control started in 1972, and rule 29 of the Olympic Charter states, simply, ‘Doping is forbidden.’ Hence, doping is cheating. Dr Robert Kerr, in practice in San Gabriel, was quoted as saying: … ‘in 1983 I was seeing 2000 patients for steroids alone … There were seven physicians who prescribed steroids right here in San Gabriel, and at least seventy of them in the Los Angeles area. Nationwide thousands of doctors were involved.’ The drugs causing most current concern are erythropoietin (in the aerobic endurance sports), insulin-like growth factor-1, insulin itself and nandrolone (in the strength-power sports).

A major problem facing governing bodies and national associations who ban competitors for doping is that they may be taken to court by professional athletes in terms of ‘unlawful restriction of earnings’, and the association may find itself on the end of an expensive lawsuit. There is now a whole legal area connected with sport, from arranging the contracts to taking up cases such as that of 11-year-old Teresa Bennett, who took the FA to court because their rules denied her playing in her school football (boys') team, in which she was the best player. Another case was the attempt before the Lillehamer winter Olympics of 1994, by the husband of American skater Tanya Harding, deliberately to cripple her main rival, Nancy Kerrigan, by hitting her knee with an iron bar. Fortunately Kerrigan recovered, and went on to win a medal.

Sport and religion

Sport has long been seen, rightly or wrongly, as a very useful means of education, of social control, and even as a means of evangelizing. An increasing number of Christian athletes, for example Jonathan Edwards, the current triple-Jump Olympic champion and world record holder, are following the example set by 1924 400 metres champion Eric Liddell, who in 1925 went as a missionary to China. But even he was just the latest in a long line of ‘Muscular Christians.’ Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile, in 1762, was the inspiration for famous physical educators such as J. F. G. Salzmann. But Charles Kingsley and Tom Hughes are generally credited with being the pioneers of Muscular Christianity — title of a chapter in ‘Tom Brown at Oxford’ (1861) which contains: ‘The least of the muscular Christians has got hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man's body is given him to be trained … then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of righteous causes. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship.’ As one of the founders (later principal) of the Working Men's College in London, Hughes launched an athletic programme there in 1854, with a cricket team and a fully equipped gymnasium. He also taught boxing in the basement. Elspeth Huxley's 1973 biography The Kingsleys noted: ‘In Amyas Leigh he created the quintessentially muscular Christian, transparent, honest, brave, strong, chivalrous, none too bright but resourceful in emergencies, chaste, loyal to God, Queen, Devon and his mother.’

Sport and nationalism

There is a powerful nationalist element behind all international sport — as those who witnessed the extreme partiality of the American crowds in the Atlanta Games will testify although Sydney 2000 was very fair. Within the UK, Wales and Scotland advertise the fact that they exist as a countries through sporting success, hence their extreme fondness for rugby and football, respectively. The Republic of Ireland gained huge recognition with Michelle Smith's three swimming 1996 Olympic gold medals. Yet among the athletes, as the current author witnessed in Munich after the terrorist attack which killed eleven members of the Israeli team, there is a very strong feeling to require future Olympic teams to march into the arena, not by country, but by event. (The competitors in each event tend to know each other very well, while hardly knowing at all the majority of their own country's team members, so it makes social sense.) Also, many felt they would prefer the Olympic flag to be raised, and an Olympic anthem to be played at medal presentations. This will not happen. The television companies have a massive incentive in playing the nationalist card to augment their viewing figures.

The sociology of sport

Finally, the whole sociology of sport, in terms of race, class, gender, local history, professionalism, empowerment, — inter multa alia — is being increasingly analysed by sports sociologists, such as Professor Jennifer Hargreaves with, for example, her widely acclaimed texts ‘Sporting Females’ and ‘Heroines of Sport: The Politics of Difference and Identity’, and Professor Grant Jarvie, who focusses deeply into local community sport (eg Highland Games and shinty). In addition, sport provides a very large employment outlet, being economically of major importance in the leisure and tourism, and sports equipment, clothing and shoe industries. Think of football, golf, fishing, skiing and horse-racing — and leisure sports wear. In Ireland, for example, sport is one of the country's major employers.

Sport and the arts

Don Masterton, a commentator on the arts and sport, noted that ‘If sport does have a relationship with the arts, then drama is its closest kin’, and dance indeed would seem to have a foot in both camps. Robert Frost thought that ‘writing poetry without rhyme, is like playing tennis without a net.’ Lillian Morrison wrote. ‘There is an affinity between sport and poetry. Each has power to lift us out of ourselves. They go naturally together wherever there is a zest for life.’ While we may think it the province only of poets and artists to seek beauty, consider Robert Francis' description of ‘The Skier’:He swings down like the flourish of a pen
Signing a signature of white on white
or of gymnasts:Competing not so much with one another
As with perfection,
They follow follow as voices in a fugue,
A severe music.

Sport and War

George Orwell held that ‘International sport is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence — in other words it is war minus the shooting’. Conrad Lorenz took a different view: ‘A simple and effective way of discharging aggression in an innocuous manner is to redirect it into sport.’ In war, men fight to support comrades, not to dominate the enemy, and Jean Rostrand noted: ‘In war, man is much more sheep than wolf; he follows, he obeys. War is servility, rather a certain fanaticism and credulity, but not aggression.’ Yet especially in the First World War, the boundaries with sport seem blurred, as a contemporary account shows: ‘7.30 am 1 July 1916. As the gunfire died away I saw an infantry man climb onto the parapet into No-Man's land, beckoning others to follow. As he did so, he kicked a football; a good kick, the ball rose and travelled towards the German line. That seemed to be the signal to advance.’ Thus began the blackest day in the entire history of the British Army.On through he heat of slaughter
Where gallant comrades fall
Where blood is poured like water
They drive the trickling ball
Anon .
There is a hill in England
Green fields and a school I know
Where the balls fly fast in summer
and the whispering Elm trees grow
There is a hill in Flanders
Heaped with a thousand slain
Where the shells fly at night and noontide,
And the ghosts that died in vain.
Everard Owen Three hills and other poems.
Again: ‘… on Christmas Eve, along several stretches of the Flanders front, curious festive scenes took place, including some of he most incredible sporting scenes in the war — in at least two places along the front, footballs were produced and impromptu matches were started between German and British soldiers.’These happy boys who left the football field,
The hockey ground, the river, the eleven,
In a far grimmer game, with high elated souls,
To score their goals
W. M. Letts Golden Boys
In 1884, headmaster Haslam of Rippon school emphasized the value of sport in his Speech Day sermon: ‘ Wellington said that the playfields of Eton won the battle of Waterloo, and there was no doubt that the training of English boys in the cricket and football field enabled them … to undergo fatiguing marches in Egypt … to stand up to work, and how to give and take a blow.’ This aspect of sport is still subject to contemporary debate.

Craig Sharp

See also exercise; fitness; martial arts; war and the body.