SPORTS

Allen Guttmann

Sports had a place during the Renaissance, but a relatively small one compared to their place at the end of the twentieth century. Sports are so important a part of modernity that more than one Marxist scholar has glumly concluded that they, and not religion, are "the opiate of the masses."

Modern sports are, however, vastly different from those of the Renaissance. In theory, if not always in practice, they are national and international rather than local. They are open to all on the basis of athletic ability rather than restricted to a few on the basis of social class. In their formal-structural characteristics, modern sports differ from those of the Renaissance in a number of ways. They are highly specialized, in that many of them (like rugby and soccer) have evolved from earlier, less differentiated games; it is increasingly rare for anyone to excel at more than one sport. Modern sports are rationalized, in that the rules are constantly revised from a means-ends point of view; the equipment and facilities are standardized; and the players train scientifically, employ technologically advanced equipment, and strive for the most efficient use of their skills. They are quantified, in that achievement is defined by points scored or by the precise measurement of times and distances. Finally, they are characterized by the quest for an unsurpassed quantified achievement, which is what we mean by the "sports record" in this uniquely modern usage. A number of traditional sports have survived into the twenty-first century, but they have been pushed to the margins of modernity. While the Frenchman of the pays Nantais still enjoys his traditional game of boule, tens of millions of Europeans play soccer football and hundreds of millions watch the World Cup on television.

THE RENAISSANCE

For the Renaissance aristocrat celebrated by Baldassare Castiglione in The Courtier (1528), a much-mocked adage might actually have been true: it was not whether one won or lost but how one played the game. There has rarely been as much emphasis on decorum and good form in the practice of sports.

Tournaments. This attitude can be seen in the evolution of the tournament from the bloody melee of twelfth-century armed combat to the allegorical pageantry of sixteenth-century spectacle. Early tournaments involved a crowd of knights energetically engaged in a free-for-all the purpose of which was to capture and to avoid captivity. Spectators were rare, rules were minimal, and bloodshed was an accepted part of the game. At a tournament held near the German town of Neuss, in 1240, scores of knights were killed. Deadly violence was so characteristic of medieval tournaments that the Roman Catholic Church attempted in vain to ban them.

In contrast to medieval mayhem, the tournament held by René d'Anjou at Tarascon in 1449 was a model of chivalry, a symbolic statement of political authority rather than a visible proof of martial prowess. René's account of the event is a compulsively detailed etiquette book regulating exits and entrances, proper verbal formulas, and appropriate dress. The jousting pairs that replaced the mob of medieval combatants are scarcely mentioned.

The tournament staged by Henry VIII in 1511 to mark the birth of his son by Katharine of Aragon was an occasion for Henry and his court to appear as Ceur loyall (Loyal Heart) and other allegorical characters. Of the thirty-six vellum membranes of the Great Tournament Roll of Westminster, only three show Henry tilting before the pavilion from which his queen observes and admires him. Thirty membranes picture the gorgeously colorful entry and exit processions.

Despite the shift of emphasis from combat to spectacle, there was always the possibility of mishap. At a tournament held in Paris in 1559, Henry II carelessly failed to close the visor of his helmet and was killed by a splintered lance. To eliminate totally the possibility of accident, "ring tournaments" were introduced. Galloping knights aimed their lances not at one another but at a set of rings dangling from cords. The symbolism, sexual rather than martial, was appropriate for an age in which wars were no longer decided by knights on horseback.

Fencing. By the sixteenth century swordplay had become a prized sport in its own right. The substitution of the rapier for the heavy two-handed sword signaled a shift from brute strength to agility and finesse. Ambitious fencing masters perfected their art in Italy and France and then gave lessons to the young nobleman of England, Germany, and Poland.

Fencing became highly rationalized, with rules to govern every aspect of the sport. Treatises on the sport emphasized its aesthetic appeal. At the court of Louis XIV, correct performance of the ceremonial bow, the révérence, seemed as important as the proper way to execute a thrust. Fencers' manuals like Camillo Agrippa's Trattato di scientia d'arme (Treatise on the science of arms; 1553) and Girard Thibault's L'académie de l'espée (The academy of the foil; 1628) were illustrated by diagrams of the appropriate positions to take before, during, and after the match. Such manuals resembled textbooks in geometry.

Football. Renaissance gentlemen were not content just to refine the sports traditionally associated with a bellicose nobility; they also borrowed from the peasantry. While various versions of folk football, which European serfs had played for centuries, continued to be popular in the countryside, young Italian noblemen transformed rustic play into urbane entertainment.

Folk football was typically a violent confrontation in which men, women, and children struggled furiously to kick, throw, or carry a ball across fields and streams and through the streets of their neighbors' village. The final goal was the portal of the parish church, but rival parishioners were seldom treated with Christian charity. Writing in The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot condemned—to no avail—the "beastely fury, and extreme violence" of the game.

Folk football had little resemblance to its descendant, the game played on the Piazza di Santa Croce in Florence and depicted by Jacques Callot in a set of prints dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1617. This sport was particularly popular in the sixteenth century, when Giovanni Bardi wrote his Discorso sopra il gioco del calcio fiorentino (Discourse on the game of Florentine football; 1580). In its classic form, the game was a highly regulated contest played by teams of twenty-seven on a rectangular field exactly twice as long as it was wide.

The contestants, wrote Bardi, should be "gentlemen from eighteen years of age to forty-five, beautiful and vigorous, of gallant bearing and of good report." He urged also that every gentleman player should wear "goodly raiment and seemly, well fitting and handsome." The emphasis upon the aesthetic aspect of the game is precisely what one expects of Renaissance sports, but there were also political ramifications. The ball was associated with the six golden balls of the Medici coat of arms and the game was frequently staged as a symbolic statement of that family's political power. There were, for instance, two games of calcio played in the summer of 1558 to celebrate the marriage of Lucrezia de' Medici and Alfonso II d'Este.

Archery. In Gubbio and other Italian cities, the middle class competed in crossbow contests, but archery's center of gravity lay north of the Alps, in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Crossbow guilds, whose patron was frequently St. George, recruited members of relatively high status. They were government officials, wealthy merchants, and occasionally members of the nobility. Under the dubious patronage of St. Sebastian, whom Roman archers martyred, the longbowmen tended to come from somewhat less affluent circumstances.

THE COURTIER

If [the courtier] happens to engage in arms in some public show—such as jousts, tourneys, stick-throwing, or in any other bodily exercises—mindful of the place where he is and in whose presence, he will strive to be as elegant and handsome in the exercise of arms as he is adroit, and to feed his spectators' eyes with all those things that he thinks may give him added grace; and he will take care to have a horse gaily caparisoned, to wear a becoming attire, to have appropriate mottoes and ingenious devices that will attract the eyes of the spectators even as the lodestone attracts iron.

—Baldassare Castiglione, Il cortegiano (1528), translated by Charles Singleton (New York, 1959), pp. 99–100. —

Crossbow guilds spread in the fourteenth century from Artois, Brabant, Flanders, and Picardy to northern France and to all of German-speaking Europe. Entry into an archery guild was usually restricted. Abbeville's guild was typical. The bourgeoisie of that French town limited membership to fifty. Women were generally excluded from archery guilds, but there were exceptions to the rule. The guild of St. Sebastian at Kappelen in Flanders had guild sisters who competed for the title of queen.

The annual archery meet, the Schützenfest, was a major civic festival, scheduled many months in advance, that might last a week or longer. Contestants were attracted from hundreds of miles away and matches like that held in Augsburg in 1509 attracted thousands of spectators. With a complicated instrument like the crossbow, it was unlikely that many of these spectators really understood the fine points of the sport, but the difference between a hit and a miss was obvious to everyone. When the mimetic target (a bird, a deer) evolved into an abstract configuration of concentric rings, each with a different quantified value, everyone was able to tell the winners from the losers.

If spectators flocked to archery contests, it was not simply to admire toxophilic prowess. Annual festivals were accompanied by pageantry and revelry. There were banquets with rich food and high-minded speeches; there was also drunkenness, buffoonery, and sexual promiscuity.

"Blood sports." Football games and archery matches were not the only sports events to threaten Renaissance notions of measure and decorum. Joseph Strutt, an early-nineteenth-century historian of British sports, asserted that "blood sports" attracted only "the lowest and most despicable part of the people," but, in fact, lords and ladies were passionate foxhunters and Tudor royalty led the way to the bear pits. Elizabeth I was so fond of animal baiting that she prohibited London's theaters from performing plays on Thursdays because they interfered with "the game of bear-baiting, and like pastimes, which are maintained for her Majesty's pleasure." Henry VIII was fond enough of cockfights to add a pit to Whitehall. More than a century later, on 13 March 1683, The Loyal Protestant reported that Charles II had taken most of the court "to see the sport of cock-fighting; where they received great satisfaction."

Renaissance Italy, too, had its share of violent sport. While dandies in silken uniforms entertained the Medici court with exhibitions of skill at calcio, hardier Italians pummeled one another while playing gioco della pugna (game of the fist). In the Venetian version of the sport, hundreds of men, representing different sections of the city, fought pitched battles for the control of the bridges that linked their neighborhoods. After witnessing the gioco della pugna in 1574, Henry III of France remarked that the event was "too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game." In Florence in 1611 twenty-six men were killed in a grand gioco.

EARLY MODERN TIMES

At the risk of simplification, one can say that the cultural difference between the Renaissance and modern times can be read from the changing meaning of a single word: "measure." To the readers of Henry Peacham's popular handbook, The Compleat Gentleman (1622), measure implied balance and moderation. A century later, the same term implied quantified measurement. It was clearly associated more with arithmetic than with geometry. This semantic shift can be observed in the ways that Europeans conceptualized their sports. The vocabulary of aesthetic response gave way, although never completely, to the language of quantified achievement. This conceptual transition took place in England much earlier than in the rest of Europe.

The passion for quantified results seems to have been driven as much by the gambler's desire for clarity as by the empirical scientist's demand for exactitude. Gambling was, in fact, the impetus for a great deal of early modern sport. As Robert Burton noted in the 1621 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, the impulse to wager impelled men to "gallop quite out of their fortunes."

Races. Foot races are probably a human universal, but the English seem to have developed a mania for them after 1660 when Charles II returned from exile. The Loyal Protestant of 3 March 1683 reported the king's presence when a hardy citizen managed to walk five times around St. James's Park in two hours. James Pellor Malcolm's compendium of odd events included a mention of a poulterer who walked 202 times around Upper Moorfields "to the infinite improvement of his business, and great edification of hundreds of spectators." The passion for contests of this sort grew to the point where The Sporting Magazine for April 1822 reported that some fifteen thousand spectators had come to cheer fifty-six-year-old George Wilson as he successfully walked ninety miles in twenty-four hours.

These races, which foreign travelers like Jean-Bernard Le Blanc and Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach saw as typically English, were not limited to men. In 1667 Samuel Pepys watched girls race across a bowling green. In May 1749 an eighteen-month-old girl earned her backers a considerable sum of money when she toddled the half-mile length of Pall Mall in twenty-three minutes, seven minutes faster than required.

When sportsmen turned their attention from humans to horses, times measured to the minute were not good enough. In 1731, stopwatches were used to time winners to the second. The "sport of kings" was modernized in other ways as well. In 1750 gentlemen meeting informally at Richard Tattersall's tavern began to think of themselves as the Jockey Club. They set about rationalizing England's horse races. In 1769 the first racing calendar appeared. A little more than a decade later, the English had established a series of annual events that are still high points of the sporting season: the St. Leger (1778), the Oaks (1779), and the Derby at Epsom (1780). A few years later, in an effort to rationalize breeding, the first stud book was published (1791). During the Renaissance, English sports were likely to imitate French sports, but now it was upper-class anglophile Frenchmen who established Le Jockey-Club (1833) and inaugurated thoroughbred races like the Derby at Chantilly (1836).

A BOXER OF BILLINGSGATE

I, Elisabeth Stokes, of the City of London, have not fought . . . since I fought the famous boxing woman of Billingsgate 9 minutes, and gained a complete victory, which is six years ago; but as the famous Stoke Newington ass woman [that is, ass-driver] dares me to fight her for 10 pounds, I do assure her I will not fail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows which I shall present her with will be more difficult for her to digest than any she ever gave her asses.

— London Daily Post, 7 October 1728 —

Pugilism. Illegal but nonetheless cherished as a convincing manifestation of John Bull's envied virility, pugilism flourished in eighteenth-century London. The True Protestant Mercury for 12 January 1681 reported a bout between a butcher and a footman in service to the duke of Albemarle, but it was not until after 1743, when Jack Broughton's rules were published, that London newspapers paid serious attention to "the manly art" (and not until 1822 that Bell's Lifein London began its run as the world's first sports weekly—with pugilism as a feature). Visitors from the continent expressed amazement that noblemen stripped to the waist and avenged insults with their fists instead of with their swords, and the British responded with scorn for the effeminate foreigners who relied on metal instead of mettle. Champion boxers like Broughton in the 1740s and Daniel Mendoza in the 1790s were patronized by the aristocracy, lionized by the masses, and immortalized by Thomas Rowlandson and other artists. In 1810 Tom Cribb became something of a national hero when he defeated Tom Molineaux, an African American challenger. That pugilists were shunned by the respectable middle classes mattered little to the "fancy."

Throughout the eighteenth century lower-class women flocked to ringside to see the fights at popular venues like James Figg's Amphitheatre, which opened in 1743. Women were relatively rare in the ring, but Uffenbach encountered a rowdy female spectator who claimed that she herself "had fought another female in this play without stays and in nothing but a shift."

Golf and cricket. At the other end of the social scale, golf was played by Scottish royalty as early as the sixteenth century. (Queen Mary was a noted enthusiast.) The game began to assume its modern form after the founding of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in 1754. The Royal Musselburgh Golf Club offered prizes to female golfers in 1810, but it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that a significant number of women took to the links.

Although the game of cricket can be traced with certainty as far back as the sixteenth century—when John Derrick of Guildford recalled that "he and diverse of his fellowes [at school] did runne and play there at creckett"—cricket, too, attained its modern form in the mid-eighteenth century. The first complete set of rules was published in 1744, a year after Broughton's rules brought a modicum of order to the prize ring. Cricket's first recorded gate money, collected at the Finsbury Artillery Ground, also dates from 1744. In 1787 Thomas Lord and a number of other enthusiasts formed the Marylebone Cricket Club, the game's most authoritative institution.

Cricket was popular among eighteenth-century Englishmen of every social class. The game was played on country estates, where the squire bowled and his tenants batted, and on village greens, where parsons bowled to peasants. Cricket was also popular at the public schools to which noblemen and wealthy merchants sent their sons. The women's game has never been as widely played as the men's, but its history is nearly as long. On 14 July 1743 the London General Advertiser referred to a tournament at the Finsbury Artillery Ground to which women's teams from several Sussex villages were invited. Two years later, in Surrey, eleven maids from Bramley, with blue ribbons in their hair, succumbed to the superior play of eleven red-ribboned maids from Hambleton.

By the end of the nineteenth century, cricket was everywhere perceived as the archetypical English game. For many Englishmen, spring meant not the resurrection of Jesus Christ but the return to action of the game's greatest player, William Gilbert Grace. He was probably the century's most famous (and richest) amateur athlete. Between 1870 and 1910, benefit matches and reimbursements for expenses brought him approximately 120,000 pounds.

Cricket was played in colonial Virginia as early as 1710, but eighteenth-century Europeans resisted imports from the British Isles. From Abruzzi in the south of Italy to the Polish forest of Bialowieza, hunting was the favored pastime of the aristocracy (and draconian game laws were passed in an attempt to preserve their monopoly). The length and breadth of Europe, every region had its own distinctive way to wrestle and to play folk football. Ubiquitous also was some form of bowling—boule in France, Kegeln in Germany, trou-madame in Flanders.

Traditional sport. Just as cricket came gradually to be perceived as characteristically English, the bullfight—the corrida de toros—was thought to represent the Spanish soul. The eighteenth-century matador was not yet a national icon, but a number of men (and a handful of women) won a modicum of fame with cape and spada. Germans were known for their passion for shooting clubs; every town from Königsberg in the east to Freiburg in the west had at least one Schützenverein where burghers gathered to shoot, drink the local beer, and play a game of cards. The winter scenes painted by Henrik Averkamp document Dutch hibernal enthusiasm for ice skating, sledding, and playing kolf (the ancestor of golf ). At the other end of the continent, Russian peasants played gorodki, a game in which wooden balls were thrown at small wooden figures.

None of these traditional sports has entirely disappeared, and there are now several European organizations devoted to their preservation, but all of them, even bullfighting, have been supplanted in popularity by modern sports invented, for the most part, in Great Britain or the United States.

MODERN TIMES: INVENTION AND DIFFUSION

From the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, Great Britain's role in the development and diffusion of modern sports was more important than that of any other nation. Even the French, who can claim credit for the Tour de France (1903) and its many imitations, acknowledge that the British led the way to modern sports. Although basketball (1891) and volleyball (1895) were American inventions, it was not until after World War II that the United States finally supplanted Great Britain as the primary agents in the invention and diffusion of modern sports.

Through most of the nineteenth century rowing, which is now perceived as a relatively minor sport, attracted huge crowds of spectators. There were boat races at Eton as early as 1793, but the modern version of the sport received its strongest impetus on 10 June 1829 when students from Oxford and Cambridge competed against one another on the Thames. The Henley Regatta began ten years later. In 1845 its course was fixed at 4 miles, 374 yards—the distance from Putney Bridge to Chiswick Bridge. The rationalization of the sport can be dated from 1828 when Anthony Brown of Ouseburn-on-Tyne designed a pair of iron outriggers to increase the oarsman's leverage. In 1865 Robert Chambers, champion of the Tyne, used a sliding seat when he rowed against Harry Kelley, champion of the Thames. By the 1870s the clumsy boats of the previous century had been lightened and streamlined to the point where they were useless for any purpose other than racing.

In 1879 the Henley Regatta promulgated an amateur rule that revealed its purpose in the crassest terms. The definition of an amateur excluded not only anyone who rowed for money but also anyone who had ever been employed in manual labor of any sort whatsoever. The Times of London approved: "The outsiders, artisans, mechanics, and such like troublesome persons can have no place found for them [in amateur sports]" (26 April 1880). Four years later, the upper-middle-class oarsmen who founded the Amateur Rowing Association (1882) adopted a similar set of exclusionary rules designed to restrict the sport to men (and women) of the leisure class. Although challenged by other national organizations with more egalitarian principles, the leaders of the Amateur Rowing Association insisted that the lower orders had no sense of fair play.

On the continent, the Germans were the first to show real enthusiasm for amateur rowing. In 1836 six years after Britons resident in Hamburg had formed a rowing club, German merchants founded the Hamburger Ruderclub. They held their first regatta on the Alster in 1844. The Deutscher Ruderverband (German Rowing Federation) was born at Cologne in 1883. Emulation of the English included adoption of the amateur rule and the fairly unproblematical acceptance of female rowers. Berlin's women formed their first rowing club in 1901.

In 1869 four intrepid women competed in a bicycle race from Paris to Rouen. In the 1880s and 1890s, millions more took to the road on chain-driven safety bicycles, which had front and rear wheels of the same size (unlike the dangerous penny-farthing model with a huge front wheel). Unescorted (and uncorseted) female cyclists became a symbol of women's emancipation.

Women were also among the first players of lawn tennis. Apart from the fact that both games require the players to propel a ball across a net by means of a strung racket, modern lawn tennis has very little in common with royal or court tennis, an indoor game popular among Renaissance aristocrats. Credit for the invention of lawn tennis can be given to Major Walter Wingfield, who received a patent for his portable hourglass-shaped court on 23 February 1874. A mere three years later the All-England Croquet Club of Wimbledon staged its first tennis tournament (men only). Spencer Gore won. Seven years later, Maud Watson defeated her sister Lilian to become the first women's champion.

In 1877 Britons in Paris began to play tennis at Le Decimal-Club. In the 1880s the game became immensely popular in Bad Homburg, in Deauville, and in other venues frequented by the European leisure class. In the 1920s the French displaced the British as the leading players. Between 1924 and 1929, Jean Borotra, René Lacoste, and Henri Cochet dominated the men's game as Suzanne Lenglen did the women's. Lenglen, famed for exotic attire and flamboyant behavior as well as for athletic skill, was the first sportswoman to become an international celebrity.

Lawn tennis began as an upper-class sport and has never quite lost the aura of exclusivity. Runners, on the other hand, have had their social ups and downs. Early in the nineteenth century, runners like the famed Robert Barclay Allerdice ran or walked incredible distances to win equally incredible sums of money, but the presence of gamblers and the circuslike atmosphere of pedestrianism probably inhibited rather than encouraged the evolution of modern track-and-field sports. It was not until 1864 that Oxford met Cambridge in "athletics" (the preferred British term for track-and-field sports), a full generation after the collegiate rowers met at Henley. The collegiate runners, jumpers, and throwers shared the amateur status and the social prestige of the rowers. The Mincing Lane Athletic Club (1863), which became the London AC (1866), and the Amateur Athletic Association (1880) were both dominated by graduates of the two great universities.

Continental Europeans certainly did not need anyone to teach them how to run and jump, but British influence determined which of a thousand different kinds of athletic contests became standard. This can be seen quite clearly in the units of measurement. For decades, runners who lived in an otherwise metric world ran 100-yard dashes and set records for the mile. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games (1896), was French and Sigfrid Edström, the force behind the creation of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (1913), was Swedish, but the track-and-field disciplines sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee and by the IAAF were based—with the exception of the discus and the javelin—on British custom.

Soccer football. The stamp of British culture can be seen even more clearly in soccer football. The first set of rules for soccer, which is by far the most widely played of the many games derived from folk football, was devised by fourteen English collegians in 1848 on the basis of the various rules for a number of different games played at Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and several other public schools. The first football club was founded in Sheffield in 1855 by graduates of Sheffield Collegiate School. The Old Harrovians, who established their club in 1860, were obviously another group with public-school ties. The name "soccer" (from "association") derives from the fact that the sport was nationally organized by the Football Association (FA) founded in London on 26 October 1863, a day that must rank as the most important in the modern history of the game. The FA became the model for the national organization of innumerable other sports throughout Europe and beyond.

The "old boys" wanted to keep the game for themselves, but soccer was quickly diffused downward through the social strata. Aston Villa Football Club and the Bolton Wanderers, both founded in 1874, were typical of the many clubs that recruited their first members from the congregations of churches and chapels. Within a few years other clubs destined to figure grandly in the annals of English sports were organized by the employees of industrial enterprises. Manchester United, for instance, was begun by a group of railroad workers and Coventry City had its start as a club for the workers at Singer's bicycle factory. In most cases the initiative came from the workers; it was not until the twentieth century that companies like Rowntree's (chocolates) and Peugeot (automobiles) began to sponsor sports clubs.

Soccer spread rapidly. Birmingham had its first club in 1874; six years later it had 155. Delighted by the game's popularity, the FA in 1872 inaugurated an annual tournament, the Football Association Cup. The day of the cup final quickly became for working-class Britons the equivalent of Derby Day at Epsom for the nation's ruling class. When a team of Lancashire workmen—Blackburn Olympic Football Club—defeated the Old Etonians in the cup final of 1883, it was clear that soccer was destined to become "the people's game."

By the late nineteenth century, there was an economic basis for soccer's working-class popularity. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a significant rise in real wages. The Factory Act (1850) and subsequent legislation shortened Saturday hours for industrial workers. There was more time and more money for soccer and other forms of amusement and recreation. In time, workers elsewhere demanded and received similar relief from the onerous conditions of early industrialization.

The creation of Britain's railroad network made it possible for teams to play distant opponents, but games away from home raised financial problems for clubs with working-class players. The Football Association agreed that clubs might reimburse needy players for their travel expenses, but believers in amateurism drew the line at payments for "broken-time" (time lost from work). In 1888, however, the FA's middle-class directors reluctantly accepted the establishment of openly professional teams. The strongest teams of the Football League came from the Midlands or the north of England, the country's most industrialized areas. By the early twentieth century, the connection between "the people's game" and the British working class was so strong that the football grounds of England and Scotland were said to host "the Labour Party at prayer." The religious metaphor was applied to the increasingly capacious stadia erected in the early twentieth century; they were dubbed "modernity's cathedrals."

THE FOUR-MINUTE MILE

My body had long since exhausted all its energy, but it went on running just the same. . . . With five yards to go the tape seemed almost to recede. Would I ever reach it?

Those last few seconds seemed never-ending. The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace, after the struggle. . . . I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last spring to save himself from the chasm that threatens to engulf him.

My effort was over and I collapsed almost unconscious, with an arm on either side of me. It was only then that real pain overtook me. I felt like an exploded flashlight with no will to live. . . . It was as if all my limbs were caught in an ever-tightening vice. I knew that I had done it before I even heard the time. . . . The stop-watches held the answer. The announcement came—"Result of the one mile . . . time, 3 minutes"—the rest lost in the roar of excitement. I grabbed [Christopher] Brasher and [Christopher] Chataway, and together we scampered round the track in a burst of spontaneous joy. We had done it—the three of us!

—Roger Bannister on the 3:59.4 mile run on 6 May 1954. The Four Minute Mile (New York, 1955), pp. 214–215. —

The first continental football club seems to have been established by British schoolboys at Geneva's La Châtelaine school in 1869, but the first game was played in 1863 at the Maison de Melle near Ghent. The ball and the rules were introduced by an Irish pupil, Cyril Bernard Morrogh. Boys with British connections were among the principal diffusers of the game. Eighteen-year-old Konrad Koch, who learned the game at Rugby, brought soccer to Braunschweig's Gymnasium Martino-Katharineum in 1874. Fourteen-year-old Pim Mulier, who had also studied at an English boarding school, formed the Haarlemsche Football Club (1879). Although Britons resident in Le Havre had played soccer as early as 1872, the game's takeoff can be dated from 1888, when boys from l'École Monge returned from a visit to Eton.

The date of soccer's arrival, soon or late, depended on the strength or weakness of commercial ties with Britain and on an area's geographical distance from the British Isles. Edoardo Bosio, a businessman in the industrial city of Turin, is considered to be the father of Italian football. Returning from an 1887 visit to England, he recruited a team from the employees of his firm. In 1893 British engineers working in Spain introduced the game in Bilbao. The following year British engineers working in Russia brought soccer to the employees of the Morozov textile mill. Hungarians did not play their first game until 1896, when Charles Löwenrosen, a schoolboy whose parents had migrated to England, returned to Budapest for a visit. That year, Scots employed in Sweden organized a team in Göteburg.

Between 1889 and 1901, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary all established national football federations (in that order). Between 1924 and 1932, openly professional leagues began to operate in Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Spain, and France. The French were relatively slow because soccer had to vie for popularity with rugby, especially in southwest France. When the Fédération Française de Football (1919) finally accepted professional soccer, in 1932, many of the sport's star players were recruited from eastern Europe. The belated establishment of Germany's Bundesliga (1963) can be explained by a nationalistic commitment to Turnen (German-style gymnastics) and by the Nazi regime's abolition of professional soccer.

Modern skiers pay homage to the Norwegians as well as to the English. Races on skis certainly predate recorded history, but the oldest known organized ski competition occurred among Norwegian soldiers in 1767 and the famed Holmenkollen ski jump can be traced back to 1879. Cross-country skiing became popular throughout northern Europe in the 1890s, after the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen published a dramatic account of his 1888 trek across Greenland. In 1901 Norwegian and Swedish skiers met in Stockholm for the first Nordic Games. The evolution of downhill skiing owes more to the English than to the Scandinavians. Arnold Lunn, an Englishman living in Mürren, Switzerland, invented the slalom on 6 January 1922 and promoted downhill skiing at the famed Kandahar Ski Club, which he founded in 1924. That same winter, the first Winter Olympics were celebrated at Chamonix in France. The skiers' Wunderjahr also saw the foundation of the Fédération Internationale de Ski, in which Lunn played a major role.

While the French lagged far behind the British in the invention and diffusion of modern sports, they were unquestionably the leaders when it came to the creation of international sports organizations. One reason for the French lead in this matter was the British assumption that their national federations were all that modern sports needed in the way of bureaucratic organization. When the French formed the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in 1904, the Football Association initially hesitated to join. The FA joined but then dropped its membership in FIFA in 1920 to protest the readmission of Germany. The British rejoined in 1924 and withdrew again in 1928 to protest what the FA saw as FIFA's violations of strict amateurism. The FA's quarrels with FIFA meant that the English boycotted the first three World Cup competitions sponsored by FIFA. When the European Cup was begun in 1955, the FA refused to allow Chelsea, the English champion, to enter the competition.

RESISTANCE TO MODERNITY

Devotees of traditional games, such as Basque pelota and Swiss Hornuss, have spurned the appeals of modern sports. In 1884 Thomas Croke condemned the Irish penchant for cricket and tennis and defended "hurling, football kicking according to the Irish rules, 'casting,' leaping various ways, wrestling, handy-grips," and other Hibernian sports. That year Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin founded the Gaelic Athletic Association, which counted Charles Stewart Parnell among its patriotic sponsors. The most vigorous and sustained resistance to modernity, however, was mounted by the German gymnastics movement.

German gymnastics had its immediate origins in the innovative forms of physical education devised in the late eighteenth century by schoolmasters such as Johann Friedrich GutsMuths. Putting into practice some of the thoughts articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762), German pedagogues allowed their pupils an unprecedented freedom to do sports, but—they were, after all, German—they carefully measured and recorded the children's athletic achievements. A generation later, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn transformed the program for health and hygiene into a nationalistic political movement. Inspired by Johann Gottfried von Herder and Ernst Moritz Arndt, Jahn replaced the Greek term Gymnastik with a suitably German word of his own invention: Turnen. The essence of Turnen was the combination of noncompetitive physical exercises and patriotic sentiment. The Turnplatz that Jahn built for his pupils on the outskirts of Berlin in the spring of 1811 soon began to attract students from the university. Students and other young middle-class men formed Turnvereine (gymnastics clubs) and within a few years, the Turnbewegung (gymnastics movement) had spread throughout Germany, inspiring such nationalistic fervor that thousands of gymnasts volunteered to fight against the Napoleonic army that then occupied most of their fatherland.

Jahn was an anti-Semitic xenophobe, but most of his followers were liberals and many played an important role in the failed revolution of 1848, after which thousands of them emigrated to the United States and Latin America. Those who remained became increasingly conservative. After the formation of the Reich in 1871, the members of the Deutsche Turnerschaft (1868) proclaimed themselves to be Kaiser Wilhelm's most loyal subjects.

Adolf Spiess and other German educators transformed Jahn's gymnastic exercises, which had included running, jumping, vaulting, tumbling, climbing, and swinging from ropes, into a series of formalized, rationalized, repetitive drills. Physical-education classes, where rows and columns of children moved in synchronized response to barked commands, became a means for the authorities to inculcate the virtues of discipline and unquestioning obedience.

Working-class gymnasts who found the chauvinism and authoritarianism of the Turner movement unpalatable formed the Arbeiter Turnerbund (Workers' Gymnastics Union) in 1893. The ATB had close ties to Germany's socialist party. Similar organizations, with similar links to socialism, were established throughout western Europe. By 1920, when these organizations joined to create the Socialist Workers Sports International, all of them had accepted modern sports (played, they proclaimed, with fraternal goodwill). In the 1920s and 1930s, the SWSI sponsored a series of highly successful Workers' Olympics. It is noteworthy, however, that nearly 90 percent of the SWSI's membership of 1.3 million came from German-speaking areas.

Early in the nineteenth century, Scandinavian educators like Per Henryk Ling created an alternative gymnastic tradition which they maintained was more scientific (and less xenophobic) than Turnen. In 1814 he established his Central Institute in Stockholm as a place to train proponents of his system. Although they were rivals, the Turner and the Lingians both saw themselves as proponents of an alternative to modern sports.

In opposition to competition and the "egoistic" individualism of sports, the Turner dedicated themselves to the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft (national community). The instrumental rationality of sports was judged to be no better than "Taylorism" (a reference to the American efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor). The quantification characteristic of modern sports enticed athletes to quest for records and this, too, was an occasion for ire. Writing in 1897, Ferdinand Schmidt condemned "records made possible by one-sided . . . preparation aimed exclusively at lowering times by fractions of a second or lengthening distances by a centimeter." Soccer football was described as a barbaric pastime whose most characteristic physical motion resembled der Hundstritt (kicking the dog). When Pierre de Coubertin invited German athletes to compete in the Olympic Games of 1896, the Deutsche Turnerschaft ordered its members to decline the invitation. The strength of the DT can been seen in the numbers. In 1910 it had over a million members while the Deutscher Fussballbund (German Soccer Federation) had a mere 82,000.

From the 1860s to the outbreak of World War I, German gymnastics flourished throughout eastern Europe as a vehicle for nationalism and as an alternative to modern sports. In Prague, in February 1862, two middle-class Czechs, Jindrich Fügner and Miroslav Tyrs, founded the first Sokol ("Falcon") club. By the end of the century, the movement had won the fealty of the Czech working class. By 1914 the Prague "nest," which had begun with seventy-three members, had 128,000 "falcons," one of whom, Tomás Masaryk, became president of Czechoslovakia when liberation from Austrian rule was finally achieved in the aftermath of the war.

By the turn of the century, the Slovenes of Ljubljana, the Croats of Zagreb, the Serbs of Belgrade, and the Bosnians of Sarajevo had all founded Sokol clubs that combined gymnastic exercises with a fervent demand for independence from Austrian rule. On the whole, Slavic gymnasts were less likely than the Turner to fight tooth and nail against modern sports, but Budapest's first athletic club, founded in 1875 by Miksa Esterházy, split apart in a bitter quarrel over the two modes of physical culture.

In the long run, the gymnasts lost their struggle against modern sports. By the 1930s Hungary was known more for its soccer players than for its gymnasts and Germany's Turner had to admit that they were far outnumbered by enthusiasts for football and other British imports. Gymnasts were, of course, included in the Olympic Games, but by the 1940s the quantified individual contests of modern gymnastics bore little resemblance to the activities promoted by Jahn.

Gymnastics was not the only alternative to modern sports. During the early 1920s, there was a movement within the Soviet Union to create a socialist alternative to modern sports, which were seen by many as the product of "bourgeois" capitalism. This drive for some kind of noncompetitive physical education appropriate to "proletarian culture" more or less ended in 1925, when A. A. Zigmund was removed from his post at Moscow's State Institute of Physical Culture (and subsequently executed). Three years later, the USSR staged the first of its Spartakiads. These quadrennial competitions, whose preliminary rounds were meant to involve the entire able-bodied adult population of the Soviet Union, were originally conceived as a socialist response to the "bourgeois" challenge of the Olympic Games, but they continued even after the USSR decided to participate in the international system of "bourgeois" sports.

TRANSFORMATIONS

The early history of modern sports is closely linked to the history of private sports clubs because most European sports participants—unlike their counterparts in the United States—were (and still are) club members. Europeans who yearn to participate in sports join clubs, which form the basis of national sports federations that are joined together in international sports federations, most of which are recognized by the International Olympic Committee. In 1921, when Alice Milliat, a member of the Parisian club Fémina Sport, decided that the IOC had done too little to promote women's sports, she used her position as president of the Fédération des Sociétés Féminines Sportives de France to organize the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale. A year later the FSFI sponsored the first of its quadrennial Women's Olympics.

Nineteenth-century liberalism was the ideology behind the IOC, the FSFI, and other nongovernmental sports organizations. Sports are thought to be a matter of individual choice free from interference by the state. In 1920s and 1930s, communist and fascist dictatorships rejected this liberal-democratic ideology and replaced the existing networks of independent sports organizations with a rigid system of centralized state control.

In the Soviet Union, in line with Marxist principles, local branches of national sports clubs were created at the workplace. Railway workers, for instance, were expected to join Lokomotiv while members of the secret police competed for Dynamo. Bureaucratic structures changed frequently, but the system established in 1936 was typical. An All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sport Affairs, attached to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, was charged with the administration of Soviet sports. One of its first actions was to establish a soccer league.

The system created by Italy's Fascist regime was quite similar except that the state-run organizations established were differentiated by the age of their members rather than by the nature of their work. Adults, for instance, were expected to enroll in the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (The National After-Work Association). During most of the Fascist era, administration of the sports system was entrusted either to the National Olympic Committee or to the Ministry of Education.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the leaders of many of Germany's sports federations welcomed Nazi rule. (Edmund Neuendorff, head of the Deutsche Turnerschaft was particularly enthusiastic.) Despite their many avowals of fealty and allegiance, the leaders of the various sports federations were ousted and the entire system was reorganized and placed under the rigid control of Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten. In addition to reorganizing the existing sports federations, the regime included sports programs in its organizations for children (the Hitler Youth and the League of German Maidens) and for workers (Strength through Health).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, liberal-democratic governments remained relatively indifferent to the success or failure of their athletes in international competition, but fascist regimes instrumentalized sports as a means of demonstrating national revitalization and to symbolize ideological superiority. Benito Mussolini, who was often depicted as an athlete, made sports an instrument of foreign policy. Large sums of money were invested in training elite athletes. Fascist Italy came in second to the United States at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles; the Italian soccer team won the 1934 World Cup and the 1936 Olympic gold medal; in 1938, Gino Bartali won the Tour de France.

Nazi Germany was even more successful, hosting and winning the 1936 Olympics. The "Nazi Olympics," brilliantly documented in Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia, were such an organizational triumph that Pierre de Coubertin marveled at their "Hitlerian efficiency." The prestige acquired by such triumphs was the lure that enticed the Soviet Union to join the Olympic movement in 1952.

Motivated by eugenics as well as by the desire for national prestige, Italy's Fascists brushed aside the objections of the Roman Catholic Church and extended the benefits and pleasures of sports to female as well as to male youth. Similarly, the Nazi regime was willing to compromise its belief that women should devote themselves to Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, the kitchen, and church.) Sports were seen after 1933 as a prerequisite if women were to bear healthy sons. In addition, Olympic gold medals won by outstanding female athletes like Gisela Mauermayer, in the discus, enhanced the myth of Aryan superiority.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the sports policies of Europe's liberal democracies began in some respects to resemble those of the totalitarian powers. In one form or another, a ministry of sport was established. The number of medals won (or not won) at the Olympics became a vital matter of national prestige and, therefore, of governmental concern. Elite athletes were subsidized, training centers were constructed, coaches were hired, institutes for the scientific study of sports were founded.

Concerned about fitness and health as well as world-class achievement, governments also invested in facilities designed to promote Sport for All. Western European critics complained, often with justice, that the funds spent on elite athletes were disproportionately large. Ironically, however, the disproportion was far greater in the communist societies of eastern Europe, where the rhetoric of equality masked enormous investments in the production of a tiny cohort of world champions. While athletes from the German Democratic Republic trounced those from the United States (with a population roughly sixteen times as large as the GDR's), the recreational needs of ordinary citizens were neglected.

SPECTATORSHIP AND THE MASS MEDIA

Throughout European history, from antiquity to the present, sports spectators have tended to boisterous behavior and acts of violence. Disasters like that which occurred at Brussels' Heysal Stadium in 1985, when English hooligans supporting Liverpool attacked Italian fans of Turin's Juventus club, seem minor when compared to the catastrophe that occurred in 532 when thirty thousand people perished in one of Constantinople's sports-related riots. Renaissance tournaments were grand occasions for pomp and pageantry, but they too were liable to disruption by what Henry Goldwel in 1581 called "the too forward unruliness of many disordered people."

Between the 1890s and the 1950s, crowd disorders like those characteristic of nineteenth-century soccer matches became less frequent as working-class sports fans internalized middle-class notions of proper decorum. Although the average crowd for the Football Association's Cup Finals in the decade before World War I was 79,300, there were very few disturbances of any magnitude. In the 1920s and 1930s even larger crowds displayed remarkable self-restraint. In the 1960s, however, a segment of young working-class male fans began to use soccer pitches as a site where they were able to indulge in "aggro" (aggression) and act out their alienation from British society. In the 1980s the Germans and Dutch became almost as notorious as the British. The 1990s brought a kind of convergence in spectator behavior in which working-class soccer fans became somewhat less disorderly while upper-middle-class tennis and cricket spectators became more boisterous and verbally aggressive. Whether or not the decline in football hooliganism can be attributed to governmental countermeasures, such as the drastic increase in the extent and the celerity of police intervention, is uncertain.

In any event, Italian rather than British fans may have established the pattern for the future. In regional rivalries like those between wealthy Milan and impoverished Naples, Italian tifosi ("those infected with typhoid") have created a relatively nonviolent secular carnival in which physically nonviolent supporters vie in chanting comic insults and displaying colorful (and frequently obscene) banners and placards.

The sports fans who paint their faces orange for Holland or parade about in kilts to demonstrate their Scottish loyalties perform as much for the television cameras as for the morale of the players. The evolution of the mass media has drastically altered the world of sports. Sports journalism, which began in the eighteenth century with periodicals like The Sporting Magazine (1792), now offers thousands of specialized publications. The London Morning Herald introduced a regular sports page in 1817 and conventional newspapers now devote some 15 percent of their space to sports coverage, but they cannot sate the demand for statistics and trivia. Sports dailies like the Gazzetto dello Sport (Milano) and L'Équipe (Paris) sell millions of copies. Moscow's Sovetsky Sport and Futbol (and a host of similar journals published in Warsaw, Budapest, and other capitals of the now-defunct Warsaw Pact) were replaced by an active sports press driven by economic rather than ideological motives.

Radio sportscasting began in the 1920s. German radio broadcast coverage of the Münster Regatta in 1925. In 1927, when Britons owned some two million radios, the British Broadcasting Corporation covered the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, the Grand National Steeplechase, Wimbledon, and the Football Association's Cup Final. Radio reinforced the public perception of these fixtures as annual celebrations of nationhood. In 1929 French fans were able to follow the Tour de France on radio.

The boom in televised sports did not occur until the 1950s, but the Olympic Games of 1936 were televised in twenty-seven television locales scattered throughout Berlin and the BBC carried the 1938 Cup Final. Eurovision began in 1954. Forty-five stations in eight countries telecast the 1954 World Cup. Satellite transmission, which began in the 1960s, eventually transformed the Olympic Games and the World Cup into spectacles witnessed "live" by more than a billion viewers. The spread of cable television in the 1980s and 1990s intensified the competition among media magnates like Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi, and Bernard Tapie to control the transmission of sports throughout Europe.

By the 1990s competition for the right to telecast sports events had completely transformed European sports. In 1980 television provided French soccer teams with 1 percent of their income; in 1990, the figure was 23 percent. While a handful of successful soccer clubs focus on international matches and vie for huge sums of television-generated money, thousands of smaller clubs have been deserted by fans who prefer to watch Real Madrid or Bayern München on television rather than support the local team.

Lucrative television contracts have also contributed to the Europeanization of European sports in the sense that teams like Olympique Marseilles can win a national title by acquiring stars from less wealthy foreign clubs. The collapse of communism was followed by a mass westward migration of soccer players. In 1990, for instance, seventeen of the twenty-two players on the Czech national team departed for greener fields. The process of Europeanization was accelerated in December 1995 when the European Court ruled that professional athletes like Belgium's Jean-Luc Bosman were workers who had a right to unrestricted movement within the European Union.

Europeanization is, in fact, too narrow a term to describe the social changes in sports. Most sports sociologists now speak of "globalization." Easy access to telecasts of the United States' National Basketball Association games contributed to basketball's unprecedented popularity in Europe. By the early 1990s, for instance, Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls was a hero to Roman boys (and girls) and basketball was Italy's second most popular spectator sport. Britain's Channel 4 began to telecast National Football League games in 1982. One reason that American sports appeared on European television in the late 1990s is that the American Broadcasting Company owned a major share of Canal Plus (UK), Sport Kanal (Germany), TV Sport (France), and Sportnet (Netherlands).

Globalization has had other effects. Americans now play in Italy's thirty-two-team professional basketball league and American gridiron football has made gains even in the homeland of soccer and rugby. A thirty-eight-team British American Football League was created in 1985. Six years later, the NFL launched a World Football League with teams in Barcelona, Frankfurt, London, and seven North American cities.

Another result of globalization has been a change in the racial mix of European sports. Initially, the appearance of black athletes on European teams incited outbursts of racist rhetoric. In 1987, when Jamaican-born John Barnes became Liverpool FC's first black player, fans from nearby Everton taunted their rivals with cries of "Niggerpool, niggerpool!" Although athletes of African descent are no longer an oddity on European teams, including those sent to the Olympic Games, an undercurrent of racism continues to flow. Many observers of the 1998 World Cup saw the victorious French team as a symbol of French multiculturalism, but it is certainly too early to celebrate the demise of racism.

POSTMODERN SPORTS?

Although modern sports like soccer have attracted unprecedented numbers of participants and spectators, many young Europeans prefer what the French refer to as les sports californiens. Tourists traversing the square between Cologne's cathedral and its Römisch-Germanisches Museum are imperiled by teenage Germans on skateboards. Austrian skiers have to share Alpine slopes with snowboarders and windsurfers have flocked to Baltic beaches. If hang gliders have not yet been spotted in the vicinity of Mount Olympus, they can probably be expected early in the twenty-first century.

What all these sports have in common is that they rely on new technologies, attract young people of both sexes, offer an element of risk, and resist formal organization in clubs and national and international federations. Will these sports continue to symbolize "the postmodern pastiche" or will they eventually, like others before them, become "modern"? Will they remain largely informal activities practiced in a natural or an urban landscape or will they be rationalized to the point where they too have elaborate rules and regulations, specialized venues, bureaucratic organizations, world championships, and a plethora of quantified records? To both questions, history suggests the latter alternative.

See also other articles in this section.

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