Performance Enhancement and Politicisation of High-Performance Sport: The West German ‘air clyster’ Affair of 1976

While the politicisation of high-performance sport is perceived to represent one of the driving forces behind doping, we know not much how exactly the cold war in sports has affected sporting misconduct in western societies. Therefore, we propose here to distinguish between ideological and institutional politicisation and explicit and implicit acceptance of dubious practices. We apply our framework to analyse the West German ‘air clyster’ affair of 1976 in order to examine to what extent the politicisation of high-performance sport during the cold war affected the search for innovation in performance enhancement. We find that political pressure for improved competitiveness in West German sport had served to create a semi-autonomous high-performance sport sector in West Germany where blurred lines of accountability allowed questionable practices to prosper. While the public despised the use of questionable methods, sportive nationalism served to eclipse dubious practices. West German sport leaders adopted insofar a permissive attitude towards questionable practices as sporting misconduct was not sanctioned. Thus, our results strongly suggest that sport's politicisation during the cold war facilitated the search for performance-increasing methods in western societies.     

Securing the Sports ‘Miracle’: The Stasi and East German Elite Sport

Given the political and social importance of East Germany's elite sports system, the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) constructed a comprehensive and invasive system of surveillance to protect the clandestine state doping programme, to prevent flight to the West by sportspeople, to ensure the smooth running of sports events, and in general to help maintain the country's status as a sporting superpower. While the Stasi enjoyed much success in its mission, thanks in no small part to the deployment of several thousand informers, its authority and capabilities were constrained by the magnitude of its many other security operations, the autonomous actions of sports fans and performers, the defection of high-profile individuals, and internecine rivalries between major sport-political and bureaucratic organisations such as the DTSB and the Dynamo Sports Associations. The collapse of the East German communist system and the declassification of state and Party materials opened up both the top-performance sports system and the Stasi to critical enquiry, triggered bitter disputes over the appropriateness of the judicial, moral and political reckoning with East Germany's sporting legacy, and highlighted the convergent paths of elite sport across the Iron Curtain.     

‘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.     

‘You Had to Cover Nadia Comaneci’: ‘Points of Change’ in Coverage of Women’s Sport

Abstract

In the 1970s, women’s sport underwent significant change in the United States resulting in an increase of participation opportunities and funding at the interscholastic, intercollegiate, professional and international levels. Yet, media outlets continued to ignore women and, at best, portray them in gender stereotypical ways. Considering the lack of progress for women in sports media coverage, this study employs sport historian Jaime Schultz’s ‘points of change’ framework in order to identify those moments that constituted an ideological shift in the process of covering women’s sport. Drawing upon oral history interviews with journalists who wrote about women’s sport in the 1970s and 1980s, this research provides a deeper look into how journalists experienced and addressed the shifting gender ideologies of the time period. Journalists’ memories, accompanied by their articles, reveal how media practitioners negotiated meanings about femininity and athleticism in response to events that challenged deeply embedded assumptions about gender and its intersections with ethnicity, race and sexuality. This exploratory research, thus, identifies several ‘points of change’ – or points of struggle, conflict and resistance – and calls for a re-periodization of the history of women’s sports coverage.     

‘Tri-ang Strong Toys’: Lines Brothers and British Motor Sport in the Inter-War Period

This article explores the confluence of British motor sport, toy car manufacture and leisure during the period from 1919 to 1939. Mass-production toy-making had been bound up with the manufacture of sporting and fancy goods from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Motorised transport benefitted from many of the same practices and light engineering techniques honed in cycle manufacture. The fashionable Brooklands circuit was established before the First World War as a proving ground for aeronautical and motorised transport. However, as motor racing resumed during peacetime, especially at Brooklands, a certain upper-class glamour attached to car ownership, whether for racing, leisure or pleasure. The most significant producer of a range of toy vehicles, Lines Brothers, began as family woodworking firm in the 1870s and could legitimately claim to be the largest toy multinational in the world by 1950. Its ‘Tri-ang’ brand of ‘strong toys’ were engineered using similar principles to the mass-produced automotive industry. By the 1930s the toy pedal car would become the ultimate child's accessory, with models of racing marques and other leisure vehicles available at a range of price points. The vehicles allowed children to sit inside and pedal their way around, allowing a degree of freedom and exploration. Manufacturers therefore referenced the sport and leisure practices of adults in creating aspirational pedal cars for child consumers. This raises the question of the extent to which these objects socialised children into ‘adult’ worlds, not just of sport and leisure but also urban and suburban consumer culture and how this, in turn, affected notions of play.     

‘Ready to Step Up and Hold the Front Line’: Transitioning from Sport History to Indigenous Studies,and Back Again

Abstract

The academy has not been a safe haven for Indigenous bodies, nor the epistemologies, methodologies, and practices we bring into such spaces. The omission of Indigenous views from standard historical accounts was (and remains) an essential part of asserting colonial ideologies and to the mission of colonization. There is much work to be done in the field of sport history and as an Indigenous person and sport historian, I hope to contribute to the rewriting and rerighting of sport history, in support of the larger process of decolonization. Indigenous studies is a place where I can engage in practices premised on reciprocal responsibilities, and it is a space where I feel there are substantial and urgent contributions to be made.     

Comment on ‘Performance analysis in football: A critical review and implications for future research’

Abstract

MacKenzie and Cushion (2013) recently reviewed performance analysis research in association football (soccer). Their critical review focused on several themes related to methodological approaches such as sample size, match context and operational definitions and the implications of research findings to professional practice. In this response letter, we comment on additional pragmatic concerns regarding these key themes as well as some of the difficulties commonly faced when conducting performance analysis research.     

‘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’.     

Sport and the New Culture of the ‘Second Golden Age’: Amsterdam’s Sporting Entrepreneurs in the 1880s and 1890s

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam underwent important changes in its economic, social, and cultural life as the city entered what is often referred to as its ‘Second Golden Age’. Old elites gave way to new and a new more entrepreneurial culture emerged focused on mass, visible, and consumable activities, including sport, in which the body played a central role. This was especially apparent from the late 1870s and 1880s when spatial changes within the city helped to ensure that sport was increasingly the location for new kinds of associational activity and the development of new products, all underpinned by the potential for profit. Entrepreneurs such as Perry & Co., De Gruyter, and the Amsterdamsche Sport-Club were able to effect strategic combinations between the new body culture and consumerism, producing a range of new products and exploiting new technologies to create new markets. In seizing these opportunities, Amsterdam's entrepreneurs were also reproducing the concept of the trainable, measurable, and consumable body.     

‘Necessary Cessation from Toil and Work’: Young Christian Workers and the Question of Sport on Sundays in Post-War Melbourne

Abstract

The Young Christian Workers (YCW) is an international movement for young Catholics, engaged through a method of education called ‘See, Judge, and Act’. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Australian YCW became known for running campaigns on a range of social issues and the provision of services – including sporting events and competitions. In this paper, the development of the Australian YCW Football Association during the 1950s is explored, and the history of YCW members’ participation in public debates about the morality of Sunday sport, which culminated in a local referendum in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell in 1959, is traced. Drawing on archival materials and interviews conducted with former young workers, the paper explores tensions within Christianity around the meaning of ‘leisure’, ‘idleness’, and Sunday as a day of observance and rest. This examination of the Melbourne debate of 1959 will show how religious tensions around Sunday sport were shaped by class, youth, and masculine identities.     

‘Power in the arm,steel in the will and courage in the breast’ – a historical approach to ideal norms and men’s dominance in Swedish club sports

From both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, research shows that men and masculinities have dominated the Swedish sports movement for a long time and that sport as a so-called ‘democratic people’s movement’ has been criticised for being a male movement. Given the self-made claims of the Swedish Sports Confederation’s fostering of inclusivity and democratisation, this study encompasses a critical and historical perspective on the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of sport. The study object is a Swedish sports club and the specific aim is to analyse the prevailing norms and ideals and how they eventually helped to reproduce men’s domination in a local sports club. Chronologically, the paper uses a historical comparative approach studying the club’s 1910s–1920s and 1970s–1980s. The research questions put are: What characterised the norms of the ideal member and collective membership in terms of gender and did these change over time? Is it possible to find specific examples of inclusion and exclusion techniques by studying the club’s photographs and stories? The main result shows subtle and explicit power techniques that reproduced (some) men’s superior position at the club level.     

Sport and doping: from WADA’s monopoly to collective arrangements and new model of anti-doping

Abstract

On April 1, 2018, the new standards of compliance to the code of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) came into force. The new standards impact all sports. An important amendment has been made to an article of the existing code ‘Additional Roles and Responsibility of the Parties’. Now, all international federations and the unions in agreement with WADA are obliged to reject applications for holding all sporting events from countries that do not comply with the WADA code. By then, Russian elite sport remained in isolation because the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) had no license from WADA until a compromise agreement allowed Russia back into international sports in September 2018. The probability of obtaining permanent return to international sport was extremely low. In order to obtain the license, Russian sport authorities were asked to agree with the reports of Professor McLaren and to admit the existence of doping support in the country at the state level, which seemed improbable. In Russia, although the new standards of the World Anti-Doping Agency code have not caused special concerns it directly impact Russian elite sport. Unless certain conditions were met by 2019, there was a high probability that Russia would not be able to attend large international competitions in the near future, including the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The situation dictates the choice of the new strategy of development for Russian sport and new model for the fight against doping, which can be not dependent on WADA. To date, there have been no real checks on WADA’s authority other than occasional decisions in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Academics who are critical of WADA’s functions often find themselves marginalized when the purported global doping “crisis” should bring “all hands on deck” to provide a humanistic and scientific approach that is best for athletes past, present and future. The functions of WADA in investigating, charging and punishing athletes do not contribute to sustainable development of sport and the sports industry around the world, and create unipolar environment of influence on sports development. Therefore, in this article, we describe some alternative forms and new order of regulation of the anti-doping relations in sport.     

Black Males in the Stadium: All ‘Bad Niggers’? French Literature,Sport and Masculinity from the 1920s to the 1950s

In the first part of the twentieth century, ‘sports literature’ presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity. The novels examined the stadiums, the boxing rings or the velodromes and noticed the existence of coloured sportsmen. Black boxers and athletes were considered as original models of manliness competing with the hegemonic masculinity, hitherto written in ‘white’. This essay intends to explore the French ‘sports novels’ published in the first part of the twentieth century. Relying on the history of masculinities and of gender, and on the methodological reflection of ‘race studies’, it examines the meeting between Black identity and athletic masculinity in literature. Thus this articles aims at showing how, through a series of stylistic, narrative and semiotic processes, the fiction essentialized the difference. Both fascinated and scared, the novels stigmatized Black sportsmen and endeavoured to analyse the alterity.     

‘Soldiers may Fall but Athletes Never!’: Sport as an Antidote to Nervous Diseases and National Decline in America, 1865–1905

During the second half of the nineteenth century concerns about hysteria and other nervous diseases in males became extensive in some countries. One presumed cause of such afflictions were military conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The Anglo-Saxon, at least according to many British and American commentators, had more sand, pluck, and courage than did men of other nations. In the United States, concerns about ‘Soldier's Heart’, a condition brought forth by the Civil War (1861–1865), were soon replaced by ‘neurasthenia’, a term used by American physician George Miller Beard in 1869. In an 1872 article entitled ‘Are Americans Less Healthy Than Europeans’, author C. S. Young hoped that the types of ‘games of competition’ that were infused with the values of Muscular Christianity’ would become part of ‘every educational establishment in the land’ so that the youth of America would acquire not only muscular vigor but ‘the manly virtues of truth, honor, and fair play’. Some attention would be given to such values; however, attention turned increasingly to ‘gridiron football’, a game likely to be infused with rampant commercialism that rapidly became the predominating sport in American institutions of higher learning. In 1898, American physician Morton H. Prince asked whether football might cause ‘traumatic neurasthenia and hysteria’ in males in the way that these conditions sometimes occurred among men engaged in a battle, and answered his own question by replying ‘no’! Football players were so well-prepared physically and mentally that there would be ‘no shock or terror’ attendant upon their injuries as might occur in a military conflict. By the time the 1903 edition of Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders: A History of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry was published debates about intercollegiate athletics that continue today were reaching a fever pitch.     

Reclaiming Canada Through Its ‘Ancient’ Sport: Lacrosse and the Native Sons of Canada in Late 1920s Alberta

Lacrosse has long been considered Canada's national sport and, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, became tied to the nationalist ambitions that sought to promote a national identity through the ‘creation’ of a uniquely Canadian game. Popular in the decades prior to the turn of the twentieth century, lacrosse in Alberta began to decline after the First World War, becoming a marginal sport played only in the province's larger cities. A brief and unexpected revival of lacrosse occurred in two communities, Edmonton and Lethbridge, in the 1920s championed by a nativist organization, the Native Sons of Canada (NSC). For this group lacrosse represented a natural means to promote their ‘Canada First’ ideology to young male Albertans. In Edmonton, the Native Sons sponsored a senior men's lacrosse team that garnered some local and regional attention, while attempts by the Lethbridge assembly to promote youth lacrosse in 1927 were largely unsuccessful. Despite the continuing affinity between Canadian nationalism and lacrosse, the NSC were ineffective in their efforts to revive interest in the sport. The ‘national’ game did not provide nativists in Alberta the platform they sought to promote their nationalist agenda.     

Sport,Prison, Violence: On Imprisonment and Confinement Conditions – ‘French Prison Sport’ and the Instruments of the World's Good Conscience

In France today, sport is considered to be a fundamental element of the educational offer in the prison environment, especially because it represents in the eyes of the majority an activity that is capable of channelling violence and violent behaviours, although this exemplary effect of education cannot be taken for granted. It is based, in fact, on a commonly accepted opinion and on evidence that is rarely questioned and is even contradicted in recent studies. But can sport, as a more or less formalised pedagogical, institutional and/or sociopolitical project, continue to be ‘educational’ in particular social spaces, like prison, which in essence distorts the conditions of unconstrained free practice and cultural dissemination? Starting from a case study, focused on France, the aim of this paper is to question the relation of sport with the calming qualities and/or, on the contrary, those that produce force fields, not by isolating it and constructing an improvised model but rather by re-inserting it into the issue of pacifying social fields, that is by re-integrating sports practice in the very place which gives it a sense and literally one which incarnates a motor praxeology with constraints – not to say control.