Olympism 5

Robert Garrett - Discus Gold Medalist 1896

...Thus for decades it appeared that international sporting contacts and competition were only possible among the geographically disparate but culturally homogeneous Anglo-Saxons, who were relatively uninhibited by ideology.

The English had successfully implanted their sports in the colonies. Considering the slowness of communication in the early nineteenth century, the similarities in English sport on the one hand and American, Canadian, and Australian sport on the other are astonishing. Yet practice and competition all over the Anglo-Saxon world remained, with the exceptions of horse racing and distance racing and possibly cricket, remarkably localized for decades. Then, beginning in the 1850s, the codification of rules (misnamed by some sports historians as the "inventions" of various games), the standardization of events, and better transport made inter-regional competitions possible. Public enthusiasm, particularly, made standardization desirable. The first professional, traveling baseball teams were established in the 1860s. By this time intercollegiate football games were common in the eastern United States and rugby matches were being played in the area around London. The first "international" football (soccer) match took place in Edinburgh on March 27, 1871, between teams representing England and Scotland.

The first intercollegiate track meet was held on Christ Church Ground, Oxford, on March 5, 1864, between teams from Oxford and Cambridge. The events included a 440 yard run, a mile run, hurdles of 120 and 200 yards, a steeplechase, the high jump, and the long jump. American colleges began to have track meets soon afterward. In 1875 Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Williams, Amherst, and Union had a very large meet which led shortly afterward to the formation of the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America. From approximately this time we can date the determined quest on the part of Americans and Englishmen for sports records, which were made possible partly by the availability of reliable, cheap stopwatches(44).

...Further developments which encouraged international sporting contests were the rise of a sporting press, full-time international sporting correspondents, and the worldwide wire services. Sports journals and sports journalists had appeared early in England and later in America. Sports newspapers and, even more, sports sections in general newspapers and magazines became circulation-building enterprises in France, Belgium, and Italy, beginning about 1890. It is likely that the especially rapid development of spectator sport in the 1890s may have been further stimulated by a symbiotic relationship between news-seeking journalists and a sports-hungry reading public.

As background material, it should be noted that Anglo-Saxon sport, particularly in the 1880s, became steadily more earnest and performance-oriented. By this I  mean that both the participants and their public became more obsessed with victory in (45) local competitions and with the setting of records in regional and international competition. The results of games and contests were seen as symbolic indications of the status of the larger social unity represented by the athletes, but perhaps this is indicative only of major ideological trends or even of mass opinion in an increasingly accomplishment-oriented society. Then, too, games like cricket, intercollegiate American football, and professional baseball acquired formulas, rituals, theatrical settings, and mythic pasts that made a game with its attendant spectators reminiscent of cult celebrations in ancient and in not so ancient times.

The performance orientation in turn led to the production of better equipment. The rapid evolution of the racing bicycle has been noted. There were also lighter tennis rackets and track shoes, shorter running trousers, and more clinging bathing suits. Training became more intense, and this dedication to sporting methodology led to a vast increase in the publication of more or less scientific literature on the subject. New gymnasiums, stadiums, and amphitheatres were built to accommodate the paying sports consumers. Money from sports events made fortunes for many promoters, some gamblers, and a few athletes.

Along with the success of vulgar spectator sport and the aura of lucre surrounding it, professional sport was dreaded as corrosive to what had been, for only a slightly longer period, a preserve of the leisured rich. The rich rejected money as a reward for sporting supremacy. A campaign to preserve an area of "clean" competition apart from and above the working-class professionals dates from the mid-nineteenth century in England, and it began among the rowers. Later, the success of professional sport intensified the campaign to isolate it. In the Nation (New York) in 1893 a writer viewed with alarm the "athletic craze" in American universities. The promoters in the colleges were "debauching" youth by "being easy with these young professionals on examinations" and by allowing (46) professional athletes to haunt the college buildings as sham students. But the same moralist noted that Yale's gate receipts for intercollegiate football games more than covered the expenses for Yale's entire athletic program.

At this stage I would like to summarize some of the points that have been made so far. I have discussed the uses and spread of the word "Olympia," the survival of literary records of the ancient Olympic festival, and the excavations following the rediscovery of the ancient site. I have shown that there have been many projects, both proposed and realized, to institute modern "Olympic Games." In the later nineteenth century the isolated Athenians participated in a series of sporting meets that were inspired by the myth that modern Greeks are the sole legitimate heirs of the classical Hellenes. England was the only European nation where the medieval peasant recreations and the aristocratic tournaments never perished, and, in fact, served as the foundations of modern sport. In England there were "Olympic" sports festivals as early as the seventeenth century. Later English "Olympics" recalled the sentimental and the racial traditions of ancient Greeks.

An ideologically inspired and somewhat different tradition in physical education and recreation was established in Germany in the late eighteenth century. Later the "turners" had their own sports festivals. Classical sport came to be considered a special province of German scholars because of their innovative work in sports historiography and, later, because of the excavations of German archaeologists at the ancient site of Olympia. In German society the classicists were separated from the turners, who, in turn, deliberately isolated themselves from Anglo-Saxon sport, which was becoming increasingly popular and widely known. The spread of sport was one aspect of the social and cultural internationalism of the late nineteenth century (47).

-The First Modern Olympics, Richard D. Mandell