‘This dark world’: the blindfold chess-player in Victorian literary and urban culture

George Walker's March 1840 article for Fraser's Magazine entitled ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’ outlined the history and method of blindfold chess (or chess-play without sight of the board and pieces). Arriving as chess was becoming increasingly visible within nineteenth-century literary and urban culture, Walker's essay covered familiar issues on the topic concerning spectacle, utility, and bodily and mental damage, as well as furthering his own concerns with the history of the game and the possibility of expanding participation. This assessment of ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, part of wider research concerning chess in urban and literary modernity, complements research published in the author's monograph on the cultural chess-player and previously within Sport in History. Prominent themes of Walker's article include the multiple identities of the blindfold chess-player and the game’s ever-changing relationship to standards of respectability. ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, offering a lengthy ‘how-to-play’ to the beginning player and outlining the national prestige and celebrity of historical blindfold chess-players, also presents a potentially disreputable reading of practice and player, denying any wider social utility.     

Theory development in sport management: My experience and other considerations

This article is designed to generate thought about the development of theory in sport management. A basic overview of theory and theory development is offered along with the author's thoughts on features necessary for generating strong theoretical contributions. Further, the author provides the strategies she utilizes when engaging in these academic endeavors. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of potential barriers to the development of theory within the field of sport management.     

Sport physiology research and governing gender in sport—a power–knowledge relation?

This article sets out to show how physiological knowledge about sex/gender relates to power issues within sport. The sport physiology research at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (Swedish acronym: GIH) during the twentieth century is analysed in relation to the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation during the same period. The analysis is constituted by Michel Foucault's notion of power–knowledge relations and regimes oftruth. The construction of sex/gender in the physiological research changes over time. Comparative studies on the function of ‘sexual difference’ during strenuous work, which, in hindsight, might be seen to restrict women's sport participation, was gradually displaced by a lack of interest in sexual difference, and later by a growing fascination with sexual difference from a ‘gender perspective’ in terms of women being ‘different but equal’ to men. This displacement goes hand in hand with a displacement of the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation, where a pre-World War II strategy of excluding women's competitive sport participation, restricting women's physical exercise to gymnastics, was after 1945 followed by a strategy of including women. This was at first in the name of ‘women's right to do sport’—where the physiological research advocated this endeavour—and later in the name of ‘women's right to do sport on their own terms’. However, the research was still being conducted based on the male physiology as the norm.     

A Failed Project in Turkey's Sports History: The Law on Physical Education of 1938

The aim of this article is to analyse the Law on Physical Education of 1938 to demonstrate the state interventions in Turkey's sport history. The Law was claimed to be the first one in the world which made physical education (PE) and sports obligatory to its citizens and was created on the verge of the Second World War. It was prepared by Carl Diem under the direction of Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. According to the Law, male citizens aged between 12 and 45 years, and female citizens between 12 and 30 years would be required to perform PE and sports regularly. For the execution of the Law, a General Directorate of Physical Education was founded. Many grand plans such as creating sports complexes, and training teachers and staff were made without taking the socio-economic conditions of the country into consideration. Ultimately, due to the effects of the economic and political conditions of the nation and the wider world, the Law failed to fulfil the expectations of its creators. Two government-supported journals named Beden Terbiyesi ve Spor and Ülkü are examined here as primary sources to see how the Law was enforced and how they reflected the Law and the period.     

Emigrants at Play: Gaelic Games and the Irish Diaspora in Chicago, 1884–c.1900

This article uncovers the origins and early history of Gaelic games in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and examines the ways in which membership of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) allowed sections of the city's Irish population to preserve and express their ethnic specificity and support for Irish nationalism. In doing so, it adds to the author's earlier research which has begun to redress the neglect of Gaelic sport in the broader historiography of the Irish in America.     

Not just Any Wintry Afternoon in England: the curious contribution of C.R.W. Nevinson to ‘football art’

This paper considers the painting Any Wintry Afternoon in England (1930) (AWA) by the prominent artist and social commentator C.R.W. Nevinson (1889–1946). The painting is one of few, and perhaps the best-known, by an English fine artist to take football as its subject matter during the first 40 years of that sport's professional existence. The paper concentrates on gaining an understanding of this painting within the context of Nevinson's biography. Of course, a painting may well be admired by viewers without any knowledge of the painter at all, and no issue is taken in the paper with the possibility of totally independent readings. But from an art-history and cultural-history perspective, knowledge of a painter's biography is significant in allowing for consideration of the artwork as a product of its time. In the case of AWA, knowledge of Nevinson's hostility to sport supports the view of a leading critic, on the occasion its of its exhibition, that the painting was intended as a satire on the mass popularity of football in England in the 1920s. Forearmed with this knowledge, wariness can be taken against subsequent attempts to locate AWA within a genre of ‘football paintings’ that represent an enthusiasm for the game. Nevinson's earlier involvement with Futurism had acquainted him with that movement's tendency to take aspects of popular culture as inspiration for art. But Nevinson took football as a derisory subject matter rather than inspiration and in doing so put AWA at odds with the contemporaneous visual representations of football that had begun to appear in popular mediums such as postcards and film. Yet, contrary to some wishful interpretations though it may be, AWA, owing to its very contrariness, remains an important historical image in the visual representation of football as popular culture.     

Real Tennis and the Civilising Process

This article examines the social significance of Real Tennis among the Western European nobility during its heyday of the sixteenth century. Underpinned theoretically by Norbert Elias's seminal empirical work The Civilising Process, this article seeks to identify the societal preconditions for the emergence of Real Tennis, and provide explanations for its diffusion across Western Europe and subsequent boom in popularity among the nobility. A critique is offered of the current body of literature written on Real Tennis, with an aim to address a general lack of focus on the game's ‘social’ elements and how their development is linked with structural changes to the game over the centuries. The article then goes on to examine the ways in which Real Tennis became a symbol of prestige and a tool for social mobility among the increasingly status-competitive royal court nobility. Played during royal festivals, the game provided opportunities for nobles to engage in conspicuous consumption through architectural, clothing and gambling displays; having an entourage in accompaniment to the noble players; and, through the style of play and behavioural control, exhibiting self-restraint and foresight. Overall, an attempt is made to apply Elias's theoretical framework to aid our understanding of the development of Real Tennis, a game that has never been characterised by overt ‘violence’ of the kind examined previously by other sociologists employing an Eliasian framework.     

西班牙对体育运动中使用兴奋剂的法律应对

从比较法视野出发,西班牙刑法对体育领域,尤其是在运动员服用兴奋剂实施刑事制裁的问题上存在分歧。有的反对将兴奋剂违法行为入刑,有的则同意制定特定的体育犯罪,但对于罪名是保护一项独特权利还是保护几项权利,并没有一个“和平”的界定。换言之,要想为统一处罚兴奋剂相关行为提供依据,必须确定兴奋剂犯罪中是否存在其他犯罪无法充分保护、可涉及的若干法律权利。     

Moving into and out of high-performance sport: the cultural learning of an artistic gymnast

Background: High-performance sport has been described as a formative environment through which athletes learn sporting skills but also develop athletic selves. Within this process, career movements related to selection for and de-selection from representative teams constitute critical moments. Further, retirement from sport can be problematic as the athletic self becomes ‘obsolete’. This dilemma is acute in sports that demand an early entry, extreme time investments and a high risk of retirement before adulthood. Women's artistic gymnastics (WAG) is such a sport.

Purpose and scope: This article considers an artistic gymnast's (Marie) experiences of movement into and out of this sport. Marie's construction and reconstruction of her athletic self when she entered gymnastics at the age of six, relocated to a different city in order to train with the national team at the age of 15, and retired from the sport one year later receives particular attention.

Method and theoretical perspective: An in-depth biographical interview was conducted with Marie. Further, the first author's personal knowledge of this gymnast's career experiences was used for contextualisation. The analysis of data involved the identification of learning outcomes during her time in high-performance WAG and post-retirement. Storied accounts surrounding the key learning experiences were compiled. In order to understand Marie's learning, cultural perspective of learning developed by education scholars and the respective metaphors of ‘learning as becoming’ and ‘horizons for action’ and ‘horizons of learning’ are employed.

Findings: Marie's choice of relocating to train with the national team involved her assuming a temporary orientation towards the requirements of the high-performance WAG context she entered. To achieve this, Marie suppressed the dispositions she had brought to this setting and adjusted her training philosophy, relationship with her coach, diet and socialising. Further, despite Marie intending to only momentarily adjust to the practices of the high-performance context, her learning was deep. Upon retiring from gymnastics, she could not leave the high-performance gymnastics self behind. The subsequent process to adjust to life without gymnastics was difficult and testing, and could only be realised with professional treatment.

Conclusion: Learning in sport is not limited to athletic skills. Athletes’ selves are formed in interaction with sporting contexts and actors. This embodiment can become durable and cause significant conflict when moving out of sport. To handle life without sport, adjustment may be challenging and lengthy.

Recommendations: Sporting cultures should allow for more interactive learning and athlete diversity. Coaching practices that allow athletes to voice difficulties should be provided. Athletes should be encouraged to reflect upon their sporting experiences and upon leaving high-performance sport, should be (professionally) supported.     

The Other Jules Rimet Trophy

The theft of the Jules Rimet Trophy in 1966 was just one of a number of stories to emerge from the competition's only appearance in England. Whist certain aspects of the story are well known, such as the trophy's recovery from under a south London hedge by a dog, there was also a trail of subterfuge and clandestine negotiations that have never reached the public gaze. In this article, the full actions of the Football Association in arranging the manufacture of an illegal and unacknowledged replica will be outlined. The theft of the Jules Rimet Trophy serves as a starting point, but even after the trophy was safely returned, the FA continued the production of the replica, without the knowledge of permission of its owners, FIFA. Based on official records of all the various parties involved, this article reconstructs a part of football history for the first time and raises several questions concerning the motives and actions of those involved.     

Cricket,Entertainment, Glamour Industry and Promotional Culture in India, 1913–2013

Cricket and entertainment in India have been inextricably connected deeper and wider than is acknowledged by commentators. They have successfully exploited one another's positive image to intensify their appeal, brand value and consumption potential. This article examines the significance of this convergence of cricket and entertainment within a historical framework, focusing principally on Bollywood's use of cricket as a strategy to maximise publicity. The history of cricket's appropriation for promotional campaigns provides an entry into the cultural modes of cricket's interaction with other forms of leisure, exploring the limits and excesses of promotion and dispelling myths of cricket's pre-eminence as a recent phenomenon. In the first two sections, the article analyses the appearance of cricketers in advertisement, promotional events, films and television serials. In the next two, it explores how entertainment personalities have used the medium of cricket for promoting themselves as leisure products. By examining the agency of cricket and entertainment as constitutively contributing to the ever morphing practices of this consumer culture, the article registers the entanglement between aesthetic and commercial imperatives in the capitalist/personal enterprise of publicity in modern India.     

Bowling Maidens Over: 1931 and the Beginnings of Women's Cricket in a Yorkshire Town

This article focuses on the development of women's cricket in a West Yorkshire town – Brighouse – in the 1930s. It situates this subject within the context of the growth of women's cricket more generally, and goes on to explore the personality and uniqueness of women's cricket in the town. The article identifies key issues in the way that women's cricket was perceived at the time, particularly in the pages of the Brighouse & Elland Echo, the local newspaper. As such, it considers the novelty of the sport, the gender stereotyping that was an important aspect of newspaper coverage, the relationship between women's and men's cricket, and also the marketing of key fixtures.     

Expectancy effects in tennis: The impact of opponents' pre-match non-verbal behaviour on male tennis players

Abstract

In this study, we examined the impact of a male opponent's pre-match body language and clothing (general vs. sports-specific) on how his performances were judged by an observer. Forty male tennis players viewed videos of a male target tennis player warming up and then observed playing footage of the target. Each participant viewed the target player warming up displaying one of four combinations of body language and clothing (positive body language/tennis-specific clothing; positive body language/general sportswear; negative body language/tennis-specific clothing; negative body language/general sportswear). Participants rated the performance of the tennis player and gave their perceptions of the likely outcome of a tennis match with the target player. Analyses of variance indicated that clothing and body language had an interactive effect on both outcome expectations and ratings of performance. The findings support the contention that the initial impressions athletes form of their opponents can influence the way in which they judge the performances of opponents and their perceived likelihood of success against the same opponents.     

National Sporting Pastimes,Spectacles of Sporting Otherness and American Imaginings, 1880–1920

This discussion focuses on how the rise of America's national sporting pastimes, during the period 1880–1920, was inextricably tied to the ambitions and outpourings of American print capitalism and a concomitant congealing of a sense of modern American nationhood. In examining this thematic, we explicate the manner in which American national sporting audiences during the period 1880–1920 were variously constituted through discourses of national and ethnic sporting difference or Otherness. Hence, we examine the popular representation of turn of the century rodeo practices (as narrated through the spectacle of the western showman William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody's Wild West show productions), the position of early-twentieth-century American baseball in relation to other sporting cultures (graphically depicted by Albert Goodwill, or A.G., Spalding's promotional publications, specifically the 1911 America's National Game) and the national and ethnic differences discerned within the global sporting landscape more generally (explicated within the 1919 National Geographic article ‘The Geography of Games’). These performances and representations of ethnic and national sporting Otherness played an important role in re-inscribing and legitimating the (White European American) normative core of American sport culture (as manifest within and through the dominant practices of playing and/or spectating of football, baseball and basketball).     

运动时尚与服饰流行及发展

以新的视角审视服饰的流行,分析了运动时尚的大众化与人们着装理念及消费形态的变化,揭示了运动时尚对服饰流行的深刻影响与驱动机制,以及对服装科技发展与创新的巨大推动作用.通过对运动休闲服饰消费市场的广泛调研,分析了运动时尚为服饰产业所带来的市场机遇以及对服饰消费市场的导向性,指出了这一市场变化所构成的新型消费结构与消费特征,并对目标消费群体进行了市场细分与重新定位,以有效地促进设计理念的创新与营销新模式的探索,进一步探讨并预测了未来的市场消费趋势.     

Tradition,transformation and taboo: European games and festivals in Latin America, 1500–1900

This article builds on an emerging corpus of work that seeks to uncover the history and social, cultural and political significance of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in the United States. However, it also marks a departure from any of the published work to date because for the first time it addresses the place of Gaelic games in the lives of the Irish émigré in the San Francisco Bay area. The article accounts for the origins and early history of the GAA there, and details the key agents and agencies responsible for the Association's development during the first 50 years of its existence. In doing so, it reveals that the GAA's growth in San Francisco appears to have been more moderately paced than it was in some of America's other centres of Irish immigration, particularly Boston, New York and Chicago. The article concludes by exploring the reasons for this and argues that a combination of quantitative differences in levels of Irish immigration to America's Pacific and Atlantic coasts and qualitative differences in the nature of the experiences of the Irish émigré in San Francisco were key in this regard.     

‘Lobby’ and the Formative Years of Radio Sports Commentary, 1935–1952

This article traces the professional career and influence on sports broadcasting of Seymour Joly de Lotbinière, known within the BBC as ‘Lobby’. Lobby was the BBC's Director of Outside Broadcasts from 1935 to 1939, and then again encompassing radio and television from 1946 to 1952, before concentrating on television OBs from 1952 to 1955. He is widely credited with transforming the codes and conventions of radio running commentary as the BBC expanded its radio coverage of sport in the late 1930s and in the immediate post-war years. The article provides a brief biographical sketch of Lobby's upper-class background and privileged education and how this influenced his eventual career in broadcasting. Drawing on papers held in the BBC Written Archives and on autobiographical accounts of BBC commentators, the article analyses Lobby's development of the core principles of running commentary, the recruitment and management of commentators and his relations with the producers of sports coverage in Broadcasting House and the BBC's regional centres. The article concludes that Lobby's meticulous management and analytical approach to sports commentary had a significant influence on the institutional practices of the BBC's outside broadcasting department, an influence that continues to reverberate today.     

奥运体操冠军江钰源基础训练特征分析

运用文献资料法,结合自身长期的运动训练实践经验,以江钰源5~8岁体操训练为切入点,从基础阶段训练角度探讨训练中的关键内容,阐述身体素质训练、意志品质的培养和兴趣是基础训练的重要环节;对基本技术和基本动作训练的特点进行分析,提出了相应的对策,旨在为体操运动训练提供有益的启示。     

多层次体育纠纷解决机制中人民法院主管边界的审查路径

2022年新修订版《中华人民共和国体育法》确立了我国由各体育协会内部争议解决机构、中国体育仲裁委员会、人民法院等主管主体共同构建的多层次体育纠纷解决体系,为体育纠纷专业、高效化解提供了多元救济途径。然而,当下对各解纷机制受理纠纷的逻辑关系缺乏梳理,造成当事人救济选择困惑、各机制定位混乱、争议解决效益折损。以一起界定各体育纠纷解决机制间主管边界的司法案件为引,分析各机制的法律属性和裁决效力,厘清各机制间的主管边界,确定主管权的审查规则。从人民法院角度,判断体育纠纷的个案主管权,应当以鼓励体育自治为导向,尊重体育纠纷处理专业性、封闭性的特点与效率要求,同时以司法保障当事人救济权益为底线,确保体育纠纷专业、高效、终局性解决。体育协会内部争议解决的约定不产生排除法院主管权的效果,当事人可就相关纠纷直接提起诉讼。中国体育仲裁委员会仲裁的约定可排除法院主管权,仲裁合意符合《中华人民共和国体育法》相关规定的,法院应裁定驳回起诉。     

Sport management,gender and the ‘bigger picture’: Challenging changes in Higher Education—A partial auto/ethnographical account

This paper focuses mainly on a the author's current experience of Higher Education and of a module concerned with gender, difference, sport and leisure made available to students studying for sport and leisure management degrees. It reviews the changed nature of the curriculum in the shifting socio-economic climate, suggesting that the neo-liberal¹ turn influencing Higher Education in UK is reinforcing an organisational (university) culture which is counter productive to fostering critical gender and race awareness in both staff and students within restructured sport management programs. The approach I adopt in writing this paper is partly auto/ethnographic and as such, on occasion, it looks at the previous research and current experiences through the eyes and emotions of a senior woman academic located within a changing ‘new’ university culture. Auto/ethnography as research approach and autobiography as learning medium are considered. Like this abstract, I move in and out of centring myself in the text whilst interweaving writing in a more neutral ‘academic’ form.