‘Science’, ‘Wind’ and ‘Bottom’: Eighteenth-Century Boxing Manuals

The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a plethora of sporting professionals, many of whom were involved in developing training and coaching practices. Teaching the skills, the ‘science’, of boxing became an important source of income for professional fighters while some practitioners also developed careers as trainers, normally operating on behalf of the wealthy ‘amateurs’ who retained professionals in order to make profitable wagers. These practices were described in some of the early instructional manuals of the period, notably a detailed analysis of wrestling by Parkyns in 1713, who considered technique, fitness, and diet, and by Godfrey in 1747 who included a seminal section on boxing in his A Treatise upon the Useful Science of Defence. The proliferation of boxing manuals in the last quarter of the century reflected both a revival of interest in the sport and a desire to record the essential elements of this martial ‘science’ since it was only now that contemporaries believed a full understanding had been achieved of the importance of ‘wind’ (endurance), ‘bottom’ (courage), and ‘science’ (technique). This paper explores a number of texts where authors discussed these essential components of boxing performance and highlights the longevity of their methods of athletic preparation.     

For a ‘United’ Kingdom and a ‘Greater’ Britain: the British Olympic Association and the limitations and contestations of ‘Britishness’

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Home-Nations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales joined forces in competing in the Olympic Games under the banner of ‘Great Britain’ (or deviations thereof). The Olympics served as an important symbolic site for fostering and promoting a broader ‘British’ national identity. In practice, however, the prevalence and persistence of competing national identities and allegiances roiled early attempts to create a unified British Olympic team. These counter-prevailing forces of nationalism further served to undermine the British Olympic Association's ambitious attempt to unite the British Empire in a ‘Greater Britain’ team for the 1916 Berlin Olympic Games. As this work will reveal, ‘Britishness’ was a layered, contested and racially homogenous term that was interpreted and applied differently across various parts of the British Isles and its Empire.     

‘Too Semitic’ or ‘Thoroughly ‘Anglicised’? The Life and Career of Harold Abrahams

Harold Maurice Abrahams (1899–1978) – the British-Jewish athlete made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – won gold for Britain in the 100 m sprint in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Far from being the ‘outsider’ depicted in Chariots of Fire, however, Abrahams’ ‘Anglicisation’ was extensive and played an important role in his life before, during and after his athletics career. Abrahams’ integration went hand-in-hand with his sporting success – something which was celebrated by British Jewry. Such was his assimilation, that by 1936 – a year when Abrahams courted controversy over his stance on the Berlin Olympics – he was criticised for having ‘lost’ all attachment to the community of his birth. In contrast to the film, where Abrahams is seen to be ‘too Semitic’, the Bedford athlete was actually ‘thoroughly Anglicised’. A desire to move into or support middle-to-upper class British society characterised Abrahams’ personal and sporting life much more so than his Jewishness. As time progressed, Abrahams’ Jewish origins meant less and less, both to Harold himself and to those around him.     

‘Old’ Football and the ‘New’ Codes: Some Thoughts on the ‘Origins of Football’ Debate and Suggestions for Further Research

A close reading of recent contributions to the ‘origins of football’ debate suggests that there is now more consensus among scholars about the broad sequence of events than is rhetorically allowed. However, this consensus itself rests on some shared conceptual and methodological illusions. These include: a continual naivety about the use of the name ‘football’ in the primary source materials; asystematic underestimation of forms of play (and a collateral overestimation of the importance of rules and codifications) in the development of football; and, above all, a widely shared, and very dubious, conviction that the pursuit of the historical origins of football is a meaningful activity. This article analyses each ofthese illusions in turn and suggests some methodological and substantive alternatives to them. These alternatives sum to the conclusion that the origin of both modern football codes is a far more remarkable and many-sided story than has been appreciated, even in the very best research to date. Moreover, it is a story whose many dimensions and implications go well beyond the borders of Britain, and indeed beyond the history of ‘soccer’ or ‘rugby’ alone.     

‘Studentship’ and ‘impression management’ in an advanced soccer coach education award

The purpose of this study was to investigate how coaches perceived and responded to the content knowledge and assessment processes that they were exposed to during an advanced level soccer coaching award programme. In-depth interviews were conducted with six coaches who had successfully completed the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) ‘A’ Licence in the UK. Using the concepts of the ‘dialectic of socialisation’, ‘studentship’ and Goffman's (1959) work on ‘the presentation of the self’ as analytical pegs, the discussion highlights how the coaches were far from ‘empty vessels’ waiting to be filled. Rather, the findings reveal the active role that the respondent coaches played in terms of accepting, rejecting and resisting the knowledge, beliefs and methods espoused by the coach educators. Finally, perceiving of coach learning as a negotiated and contested activity is discussed in terms of its implications for existing and future coach education provision.     

Impact ‘fingerprints’ and preliminary implications for an ‘intelligent mouthguard’ head impact dosimeter

An in vivo head impact dosimeter, termed the ??intelligent mouthguard??, is under development at the Cleveland Clinic. The intelligent mouthguard facilitates correlation of acute and accumulative impact dosage with injury risk. As part of intelligent mouthguard dosimetry development for boxing and mixed martial arts participants, head and neck impact dosage was quantified in the laboratory for seven (7) punch types. Impact dosage data for punches were collected, which generated unique ??fingerprints?? for use with the intelligent mouthguard computational algorithm. Additional calculations were made on parameters based on each punch ??fingerprint?? and injury risk. Each of the punches had a unique ??fingerprint??. The hook imparted the most severe impact dosage, with the cross and oblique hook inducing the next most severe impact dosages, respectively. The impact dosage ??fingerprints?? determined here will be used to identify punch types during intelligent mouthguard human trials in 2012. Intelligent mouthguard dosimetry will be available soon for other contact sports (American Football, Ice Hockey, Lacrosse) to monitor head?Cneck impact dosage for correlation to acute or accumulative injury risk.     

Young Chinese Australians' subjectivities of ‘health’ and ‘(un)healthy bodies’

Young people with English as an Additional Language/Dialect backgrounds are often identified in public health messages and popular media as ‘bodies at risk’ because they do not conform to the health regimens of contemporary Western societies. With increasing numbers of Chinese students in Australian schools, it is necessary to advance teachers' understandings of the ways in which these young people negotiate notions of ‘health’ and ‘(un)healthy bodies’. This paper explores the ways in which young Chinese Australians' understand health and (un)healthy bodies. The data upon which this paper focuses were drawn from a larger scale study underpinned by critical, interpretive, ethnographic methods. The participants in this study were 12 young Chinese Australians, aged 10–15 years, from two schools. Photographs of a variety of bodies were sourced from popular magazines and used as a means of interview elicitation. The young people were invited to comment on the photographs and discuss what ‘health’ and the notion of a ‘(un)healthy body’ meant to them. Foucault's concepts of discursive practice and normalisation are used alongside Chinese concepts of holistic paradigms and Wen–Wu to unpack the young people's subjectivities on health and (un)healthy bodies. The findings invite us to move beyond Western subjectivities of health and (un)healthy bodies and highlight the multidimensional and diverse perspectives espoused by some of the young Chinese Australians in this study. The research findings can inform future policy and practice relevant to the exploration of health and (un)healthy bodies in health and physical education and health and physical education teacher education.     

‘Being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’: the dancing body-subject and inhabited transcendence

Sports studies is currently dominated by the intellectualist approach to understanding skill and expertise, meaning that questions about the phenomenological nature of skilled performance in sport have generally been overshadowed by the emphasis on the cognitive. By contrast, this article responds to calls for a phenomenology of sporting embodiment by opening up a philosophical exploration of the nature of athletic being-in-the-world. In particular, the paper explores the conceptualisation of immanence and transcendence in relation to the embodied practice of dance, engaging with Merleau-Ponty’s important insight that the body can be a source of transcendence. I also draw on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with professional contemporary dancers to explore dancers’ concepts of ‘being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’, and to suggest that during the actual embodied practice of dance, dancers do not experience transcendence and immanence as they are conceptualised in philosophy. Rather, I argue, dancers experience a third mode of being that is somehow in-between these two binary terms. I have called this ‘inhabited transcendence’.     

‘Activity choice’ and physical education in England and Wales

Though agencies, such as the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and the Australian Sports Drug Agency, argue that much effort is being directed toward educating athletes about the virtues of fair play, the risks of drug use, and the ethics of cheating, the primary focus of government led initiatives is catching cheaters through testing. As a result, a decade following the inaugural Canadian Inquiry random drug testing is an accepted part of the culture of elite sport and is recognised as the most powerful deterrent for prospective abusers. As public confidence rests implicitly upon testing as the best and only direct means to establish a fair level of competition, it is perhaps not surprising that little attention is given to the ethical implications of testing as an invasion of privacy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical implications of testing athletes for the use of banned substances and determine if the current course of action is a morally justified suspension of privacy.     

Sports’ disciplinary legacy and the challenge of ‘coaching differently’

Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to coaches putting their athletes at the center of the coaching process given that coaches’ practices have largely been formed through relations of power that subordinate and objectify athletes’ bodies through the regular application of a range of disciplinary techniques and instruments [e.g. Barker-Ruchti, N., &; Tinning, R. (2010). Foucault in leotards: Corporeal discipline in women's artistic gymnastics. Sociology of Sport Journal, 27, 229–250; Heikkala, J. (1993). Discipline and excel: Techniques of the self and body and the logic of competing. Sociology of Sport Journal, 10, 397–412; Gearity, B., &; Mills, J. P. (2012). Discipline and punish in the weight room. Sports Coaching Review, 1, 124–134]? In other words, to try to develop athlete-centered coaches capable of coaching in ways that will empower their athletes without also problematizing the discursive formation of coaches’ practices concerns us [Denison, J., &; Mills, J. P. (2014). Planning for distance running: Coaching with Foucault. Sports Coaching Review, 3, 1–16]. Put differently: how can athlete empowerment initiatives be anything more than rhetoric within a disciplinary framework that normalizes maximum coach control? It is this question that we intend to explore in this paper. More specifically, as Foucauldians, we will argue that coaching with greater consideration for athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences needs to entail coaching in a less disciplinary way and with an awareness and appreciation of the many unseen effects that disciplinary power can have on coaches’ practices and athletes’ bodies.     

‘Brand Israel’: hasbara and Israeli sport

Until relatively recently, the state of Israel was preoccupied with its military security and paid little attention to cultural politics. However, the emergence of other ‘battlegrounds’ has seen a shift to ‘soft power’ in an attempt to generate a more benevolent global image. This paper spotlights an international sporting event which ordinarily attracts very limited interest from the mainstream media. However, when held in Israel, it created much greater interest. The paper identifies the UEFA’s Men’s U-21 tournament, held in Israel in 2013, to assess how different groups responded to the event: celebratory by the host nation and its supporters, the Israeli Football Association and UEFA; critical amongst Palestinians and their supporters in the international community. The paper identifies how the Israeli state is using ‘hasbara’ in an attempt to arrest its deteriorating international image and shows how the concept is empirically operationalized (‘hasbara in action’).     

‘Race’ talk! Tensions and contradictions in sport and PE

Background: The universal sport discourses of meritocracy and equality are so engrained that few challenge them. The most cursory interest in sport, Physical Education (PE), and society will reveal that the lived reality is quite different. Racial disparities in the leadership and administration of sport are commonplace worldwide; yet, from research into ‘race’ in sport and PE, awareness of these issues is widespread, where many know that racism takes place it is generally claimed to be somewhere else or someone else. For many, this racism is part of the game and something to manipulate to steal an advantage; for others, it is trivial. This paper explores the contradictions and tensions of the author’s experience of how sport and PE students talk about ‘race’ and racism. ‘Race’ talk is considered here in the context of passive everyday ‘race’ talk, dominant discourses in sporting cultures, and colour blindness.

Theoretical framework: Drawing on Guinier and Torres’ [2003. The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. London: Harvard University Press] ideas of resistance through political race consciousness and Bonilla-Silva’s [2010. Racism Without Racists: Colour-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Plymouth: Rowan and Littlefield] notion of colour blindness, the semantics of ‘race’ and racialisation in sport and PE are interrogated through the prism of critical race theory (CRT). CRT is used here to centre ‘race’ and racialised relations where disciplines have consciously or otherwise excluded them. Importantly, the centring of ‘race’ by critical race scholars has advanced a strategic and pragmatic engagement with this slippery concept that recognises its paradoxical but symbolic location in society.

Discussion: Before exploring ‘race’ talk in the classroom, using images from the sport media as a pedagogical tool, the paper considers how ‘race’ is recreated and renewed. The paper then turns to explore how the effortless turn to everyday ‘race’ talk in the classroom can be viewed as an opportunity to disrupt racialised assumptions with the potential to implicate those that passively do so. Further, the diagnostic, aspirational, and activist goals of political race consciousness are established as vehicles for a positive sociological experience in the classroom.

Conclusion: The work concludes with a consideration of the uses and dangers of passive ‘race’ talk and the value of a political race consciousness in sport and PE. Part of the explanation for the perpetuation of ‘race’ talk and the relative lack of concern with its impact on education and wider society is focused on how the sovereignty of sport and PE trumps wider social concerns of ‘race’ and racism because of at least four factors: (1) the liberal left discourses of sporting utopianism, (2) the ‘race’ logic that pervades sport, based upon the perceived equal access and fairness of sport as it coalesces with the (3) ‘incontrovertible facts’ of black and white superiority (and inferiority) in certain sports, ergo the racial justifications for patterns of activity in sport and PE, and (4) the racist logic of the Right perpetuated through a biological reductionism in sport and PE discourses.     

Marketing ‘Brand China’: Maintaining the Momentum – ‘The Middle Kingdom’ Resurgent and Resplendent

The multiplicity of manoeuvres that characterise modern China's geopolitical ascendancy and ambition illustrate political ingenuity used calculatedly with the clear intention of becoming invulnerable. Past recent humiliations are not to reoccur. In addition, ‘The Middle Kingdom’ is to be reincarnated: invincible imperialism pursued. The strategic plurality employed in complex compositional patterns is both imperial and historic in nature: the past is to be projected into the present and the future. The once ‘Great Game’ is now ‘The Great East Asia Game’! In the light of the Guangzhou Asian Games Triumphalism, there could be a ‘double entendre’ employed here of sizable significance. This essay considers the possibility.     

漂坠合一擒‘凶’‘猾’

每个垂钓者都有一个美好的梦想，那就是多钓鱼、多钓大鱼。但正如古语所道：“宁许头猪，不许条鱼”，没有哪个钓鱼人敢打保票自已垂钓肯定就能中鱼。空手而归对钓鱼人而言是再正常不过的事情。每逢遇到这种情况，他们不是推说鱼少，便是抱怨鱼“猾”。但我对他们的观点不敢苟同。再“猾”的鱼儿为了生存也要摄食，只要方法、饵料得当，再“凶”再“猾”的鱼也要上钩。     

Authenticating Mäori Physicality: Translations of ‘Games’ and ‘Pastimes’ by Early Travellers and Missionaries to New Zealand

This paper theorizes how knowledge of indigenous tribal epistemologies was made ‘knowable’ through Enlightenment rationalism in an early colonial context. Specifically, the paper determines how and what knowledge of Mäori tribal physical activities was interpreted and authenticated through early travellers' tales and missionaries’ accounts in New Zealand. The central thesis argues that what was established as authentic and truthful aligned with Enlightenment rationalism, while those Mäori physical practices incomprehensible to Western understandings were deemed inauthentic and, consequently, were obscured and/or discarded. Throughout, the article theorizes the translation of knowledge into meaningful Western discourses and how these translations came to be crystallized in the colonial imagination.     

‘Vivid and Realistic’: Edwardian Sport on Film

This article is an evaluation of the Edwardian sporting films in the recently restored Mitchell & Kenyon Collection held by the National Film and Television Archive in London. The collection reveals snapshots of the everyday life of the working class at work, play and going about their daily business, watching football, both association and rugby, participating in civic and religious events and enjoying a range of leisure activities. This article is an attempt to place these films within the sporting and social context of the age in which they were taken. It explores how different sporting activities became a major factor in developing an audience for the institution of cinema.     

Sex,sport and justice: reframing the ‘who’ of citizenship and the ‘what’ of justice in European and UK sport policy

Universalist claims are often made about sport which is, as a consequence, increasingly written into national and international policy as an entitlement of citizenship or even human right. Further, in most countries physical education (PE) is a compulsory component of children's education, and sport is seen as central to this. Consequently, in the interests of justice sport must aspire to be egalitarian, that is, relevant to and meaningful for boys and men, and girls and women. In this context three fundamental questions are asked in relation to sport: (1) Do all citizens want to participate? (2) Who counts as a citizen? and (3) What are justice and equality? Feminist political and citizenship theory particularly the work of Pateman, Lister and Fraser is used to explore these questions and interrogate the ‘who’ of citizenship and the ‘what’ of justice in relation to framing sport policy in Europe and the UK. It is argued that notwithstanding the extensive use of the Council of Europe definition of sport,¹1. ‘“Sport” means all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in competition at all levels' (CE, 1992 CE. (1992/2001). European sports charter. Retrieved from https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?Ref=Rec(92)13&;Sector=secCM&;Language=lanEnglish&;Ver=rev&;BackColorInternet=9999CC&;BackColorIntranet=FFBB55&;BackColorLogged=FFAC75 [Google Scholar]–2001 CE. (1992/2001). European sports charter. Retrieved from https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?Ref=Rec(92)13&;Sector=secCM&;Language=lanEnglish&;Ver=rev&;BackColorInternet=9999CC&;BackColorIntranet=FFBB55&;BackColorLogged=FFAC75 [Google Scholar]). and despite or even because of the widespread adoption of the language of gender equality and gender mainstreaming, although formal sport citizenship rights might be accorded to all individuals and regarded as gender neutral, this masks a discourse of androcentric sport citizenship. This has captured European and UK sport policy and provision and is hindering further progress towards gender justice in sport and therefore PE. Given the universal and compulsory aspirations of sport particularly within PE, gender justice should be conceptualised not only as cultural recognition, political representation and economic redistribution within the normalised frame of competitive performance sport or ‘sport for sports sake’; but also as a critical meta-political remapping and reframing of sport as sport and physical recreation or ‘sport for all’.     

‘‘Casuals’ culture. Bricolage and consumerism in football supporters’ culture. Case study – Dinamo Bucharest Ultras’

‘Casuals’ culture can be perceived as a postmodern phenomenon, which modifies and changes the football supporter culture in a fully blown consumerist era, where symbol movement is faster every day and implies minimal costs. Throughout this article, I attempted to prove the existence of a certain type of ‘bricolage’, created by recycling a set of brands, symbolically redefined by ultras groups. At the same time, the internalization of the ‘casuals’ movement by Romanian fanatical supporters also denotes the emergence of strong elements of hyper-consumerist culture, of differentiation and status, both at the level of individuals in the groups, as well as at the level of rival supporters groups. ‘Casuals’ style naturally matches the entrance of football and of the culture of supporting a team into postmodernity.     

‘Sweet analytics’: Athleticism and Elementary-School Football Associations

J.A. Mangan and Colm Hickey, in articles in 1999 and 2008, argued that the motivation of teachers promoting elementary-school football in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was mainly athleticism. In 2000, 2005 and 2009, I expressed my reservations about their claims. Most recently, articles by Gerry P.T. Finn in Soccer & Society in 2010 and by Hickey and Finn separately in the International Journal of the History of Sport in 2011 have argued against my reservations and offered what they consider further evidence for athleticism in elementary-school football. In response, the present article examines the evidence for the claims of athleticism in elementary-school football and concludes that it was only through failing to engage with the vast majority of sources of this kind of football, in particular the records of Schoolboy Football Associations and the sporting and local press, that the claims of Mangan, Hickey and Finn for the extent of the influence of athleticism in elementary-school football could be sustained.