sports history

Recreational or competitive activities that involve a degree of physical strength or skill. At one time, sports were commonly considered to include only the outdoor recreational pastimes, such as fishing, shooting, and hunting, as opposed to games, which were regarded as organized athletic contests played by teams or individuals according to prescribed rules. The distinction between sports and games has grown less clear, however, and the two terms are now often used interchangeably.

Many animals engage in play, but homo sapiens is the only animal to have invented sports. Since sports are an invention, a part of culture rather than an aspect of nature, all definitions of sports are somewhat arbitrary. Whether sports are a human universal found in every known culture or a phenomenon unique to modern society depends upon one's definition of sports. Men and women have always run, jumped, climbed, lifted, thrown, and wrestled, but they have not always performed these physical activities competitively. Although all literate societies seem to have contests of one sort or another in which men, and sometimes women, compete in displays and tests of physical skill and prowess, sports may be strictly defined as physical contests performed for their own sake and not for some ulterior end. According to this strict definition, neither Neolithic hunters nor contestants in religious ceremonies such as the ancient Olympic Games were engaged in sports. Insistence on the stipulation that sports must be performed for their own sake means the paradoxical elimination of many activities which are usually thought of as sports, such as exercises done for the sake of cardiovascular fitness, races run to satisfy a physical education requirement, ball games played to earn a paycheck. Strict definition also means abandonment of the traditional usage in which “sport,” derived from Middle English disporter, refers to any lighthearted recreational activity. In the minds of some 18th-century aristocrats, a game of backgammon and the seduction of a milkmaid were both considered good sport, but this usage of the term has become archaic.

Strict conceptualization allows the construction of an evolutionary history of sports in which extrinsic political, economic, military, and religious motivations decrease in importance as intrinsic motivations—participation for its own sake—increase. The disadvantage, however, is that the determination that a given activity is truly a sport depends on the answer to a psychological question: What is the motivation of the participants? The question of motivation cannot be answered unambiguously. It is probable that the contestants of the ancient Olympic Games were motivated by the intrinsic pleasure of the contest as well as by the religious imperatives of Greek cult. It is also probable that modern professional athletes are motivated by more than simply economic motives. Thus most scholars assume quietly that popular usage cannot be completely wrong to refer, for instance, to U.S. professional National Football League games as sports.

History

No one can say when sports began. Since it is difficult to imagine a time when children did not spontaneously run races or wrestle, it is clear that children have always included sports in their play, but one can only speculate about the emergence of sports as autotelic (played for their own sake) physical contests for adults. Hunters are depicted in prehistoric art, but it cannot be known whether the hunters pursued their prey in a mood of grim necessity or with the joyful abandon of sportsmen. It is certain, however, from the rich literary and iconographic evidence of all ancient civilizations that the hunt soon became an end in itself—at least for royalty and nobility. Archaeological evidence also indicates that ball games were common among the ancient Chinese. If such games were contests rather than ritual performances like the Japanese football game kemari, then they were instances of sports in the most rigorously defined sense. That it cannot simply be assumed they were contests is clear from the evidence presented by Greek and Roman antiquity, indicating that ball games seem to have been for the most part playful pastimes like those recommended for health by the 2nd-century AD Greek physician Galen.

Sports in the ancient world

Egypt

Sports were certainly common in ancient Egypt, where pharaohs demonstrated their fitness to rule by prowess in the hunt and by exhibitions of strength and skill in archery. In such exhibitions, pharaohs such as Amenhotep II (ruled 1450–25 BC) never competed against another person, and there is reason to suspect that their extraordinary achievements were scribal fictions. However, Egyptians with less claim to divinity jumped, wrestled, and engaged in ball games and stick fights of the sort that can still be observed in Egypt.

Crete and Greece

Since Minoan script still baffles scholars, it is uncertain whether Cretan boys and girls who tested their acrobatic skills against bulls were engaged in sports, in religious ritual, or in both.

That the feats of the Cretans may have been both sport and ritual is suggested by evidence from Greece, where sports had a significance unequaled anywhere before the rise of modern sports. Secular and religious motives mingle in history's first extensive “sports report,” found in book 23 of Homer's lliad in the form of funeral games for the dead Patroclus. These games were a part of cult and were not, therefore, autotelic, but the contests in the Odyssey are essentially secular. Odysseus was challenged by the Phaeacians to demonstrate his prowess as an athlete. In general, Greek culture included both cultic sports, such as the Olympic games honouring Zeus, and secular contests.

The most famous association of sports and religion was certainly the Olympic Games, which Greek tradition dated from 776 BC but which probably began much earlier. In the course of time, the earth goddess Gaea, originally worshiped at Olympia, was supplanted in importance by the sky god Zeus, in whose honour priestly officials conducted quadrennial athletic contests. Sacred also were the games held at Delphi, in honour of Apollo, and at Corinth and Nemea. These four events were known as the periodos, and great athletes, such as Theagenes of Thasos, prided themselves on victories at all four sites. The extraordinary prestige accorded athletic triumphs brought with it not only literary accolades (as in the odes of Pindar) and visual commemoration (in the form of statues of the victors) but also material benefits, contrary to the amateur myth propagated by 19th-century philhellenists. Since the Greeks were devoted to secular sports as well as to sacred games, no polis, or city-state, was considered a proper community if it lacked a gymnasium where, as the word gymnos indicates, naked male athletes trained and competed. Except at militaristic Sparta, Greek girls rarely participated in sports of any kind. Women were excluded from the Olympic Games even as spectators (except for the priestess of Demeter).Pausanias, the 2nd-century-AD traveler, wrote of races for girls at Olympia, but these events in honour of Hera were of minor importance.

Rome

Although chariot races were among the most popular sports spectacles of the Roman and Byzantine eras, as they were in Greek times, the Romans of the republic and the early empire were quite selectively enthusiastic about Greek athletic contests. Their emphasis was on physical exercises for military preparedness, an important motive in all ancient civilizations; they preferred boxing, wrestling, and hurling the javelin to running footraces and throwing the discus. The historian Livy tells of Greek athletes appearing in Rome as early as 186 BC, but the contestants' nudity shocked Roman moralists. The emperor Augustus instituted the Actian Games in 27 BC to celebrate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, and several emperors began similar games, but it was not until the later empire, especially during the reign of Hadrian (AD 117–138), that large numbers of the Roman elite developed an enthusiasm for Greek athletics.

Chariot races in Rome's Circus Maximus were watched by as many as 250,000 spectators, five times the number that crowded into the Colloseum to enjoy gladiatorial combats. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the latter contests were more popular even than the former. Indeed, the munera, which pitted man against man, and the venationes, which set men against animals, became popular even in the Eastern Empire, which historians once thought immune from the lust for blood. The greater frequency of chariot races can be explained in part by the fact that they were relatively inexpensive compared to the enormous costs of gladiatorial combats. (The editor who staged the games usually rented the gladiators from a lanista and was required to reimburse him for losers executed in response to a “thumbs down” sign.) Brutal as these combats were, many of the gladiators were free men who volunteered to fight, an obvious sign of intrinsic motivation. Indeed, imperial edicts were needed to discourage the aristocracy's participation. In AD 63, during the reign of Nero, female gladiators were introduced into the arena.

The circus and the hippodrome, a stadium of Greek origin for chariot racing, continued to provide popular sports spectacles long after Christian protests (and heavy economic costs) ended the gladiatorial games, probably early in the 5th century. In many ways, the chariot races were quite modern. The charioteers were divided into bureaucratically organized factions (e.g., the “Blues” and the “Greens”), which excited the loyalties of fans from Britain to Mesopotamia. Charioteers boasted of the number of their victories as modern athletes brag about their “stats,” indicating, perhaps, some incipient awareness of what in modern times are called sports records. The gladiatorial games, however, like the Greek games before them, had a powerful religious dimension. The first Roman combats, in 264 BC, were derived from Etruscan funeral games in which mortal combat provided companions for the deceased. It was the idolatry of the games, even more than their brutality, that horrified Christian protestors. The lesser pagan religious association of the chariot races helped them survive late into the post-Constantine period.

Sports in the Middle Ages

The sports of medieval times were less well-organized. Fairs and seasonal festivals were occasions for men to lift stones or sacks of grain and for women to run smock races (for a smock, not in one). The favourite sport of the peasantry was folk football, a wild sort of no-holds-barred unbounded game that pitted married men against bachelors or one village against another. The violence of the game, which survived in Britain and in France until the late 19th century, was such that Renaissance humanists, such as Sir Thomas Elyot, condemned it as more likely to maim than to benefit the participants.

The nascent bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance amused itself with archery matches, some of which were arranged months in advance and staged with considerable fanfare. When town met town in a challenge of skill, the companies of crossbowmen and longbowmen marched behind the symbols of St. George, St. Sebastian, and other patrons of the sport. It was not unusual for contests in running, jumping, cudgeling, and wrestling to be offered for the lower classes who attended the match as spectators. Grand feasts were part of the program, and drunkenness commonly added to the revelry. In Germanic areas, a Pritschenkoenig was supposed to simultaneously keep order and entertain the crowd with clever verses.

The burghers of medieval towns were welcome to watch the aristocracy at play, but they were not allowed to participate in tournaments or even, in most parts of Europe, to compete in imitative tournaments of their own. Tournaments were the jealously guarded prerogative of the medieval knight and, along with hunting and hawking, his favourite pastime. At the tilt, in which mounted knights with lances tried to unhorse one another, the knight was practicing the art of war, his raison d'être. He displayed his prowess before lords, ladies, and commoners and profited not only from valuable prizes but also from ransoms exacted from the losers. Between the 12th and the 16th centuries, the dangerously wild free-for-all of the early tournament evolved into dramatic presentations of courtly life in which elaborate pageantry and allegorical display quite overshadowed the frequently inept jousts. Some danger remained even amid the display. At one of the last great tournaments, in 1559, Henry II of France was mortally wounded by a lance blow.

Peasant women participated freely in the ball games and footraces of medieval times, and aristocratic ladies hunted and kept falcons, but middle-class women contented themselves with spectatorship. Even so, they were more active than their contemporaries in Heian Japan during the 8th to the 12th century. Encumbered by many-layered robes and sequestered in their homes, the Japanese ladies were unable to do more than peep from behind their screens at the courtiers' mounted archery contests.

Sports in the Renaissance and modern period

The changing nature of sports

By the time of the Renaissance, sports had become entirely secular, but in the minds of the Czech educator John Amos Comenius and other humanists, a concern for physical education on what were thought to be classic models overshadowed the competitive aspects of sports. Indeed, 15th- and 16th-century elites perferred dances to sports and delighted in geometric patterns of movement. The ballet developed in France during this period. Horses were trained to graceful movement rather than bred for speed. French and Italian fencers like the famed Girard Thibault, whose L'Accademie de l'espee appeared in 1628, thought of their activity more as an art form than as a combat. Northern Europeans emulated them. Humanistically inclined Englishmen and Germans admired the cultivated Florentine game of calcio (“kick”), a form of football that stressed the good looks and elegant attire of the players.

The development of sports into the forms of the present day began in late 17th-century England when the emphasis gradually shifted from measure, in the sense of balance or proportion, to measurement. During the Restoration and throughout the 18th century, traditional pastimes like stick fighting and bullbaiting, which the Puritans had condemned and driven underground, gave way to organized games, like cricket, which developed under the leadership of the Marylebone Cricket Club (founded 1787). Behind these changes lay a new conception of rationalized competition. Contests that seem odd to the modern mind, like those in which cripples were matched against children, were replaced by horse races in which fleeter steeds were handicapped, a notion of equality that led eventually to age and weight classes (but not height classes) in many modern sports. The traditional sport of boxing flourished throughout the 18th century, guided and regulated by boxer-entrepreneurs like James Figg and his pupil Jack Broughton, and, eventually, by the Marquess of Queensberry, whose 1867 rules replaced Broughton's 1743 attempt to civilize the sport.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, sports became increasingly specialized, and national organizations developed to standardize rules and regulations, to organize sporadic challenge matches into systematic league competition, to certify eligibility, and to register results. England's Football Association was formed in 1863 to propagate that sport (called soccer in the United States), which had developed out of medieval folk football (as, eventually, did rugby and American football). The Amateur Athletic Association followed in 1880. From England and then from the United States, modern sports spread throughout the globe. Sports that originally began elsewhere, such as tennis (which derives from Renaissance France), were modernized and exported as if they too were raw materials imported for British industry to transform and then ship out as finished goods. By the early 20th century, organizations like the International Olympic Committee (founded 1894), the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (1904), and the International Amateur Athletic Federation (1912) had begun to seem inevitable.

During the age of imperialism, when Europeans and Americans dominated much of Asia and most of Africa, the colonial powers suppressed traditional sports and introduced their own modern ones. Japan, one of the few non-Western nations where a traditional sport (sumo) rivals a modern one (baseball) in popularity, is also one of the few non-Western nations to contribute a sport (judo) to the modern Olympic Games.

Behind the dramatic transition to modern sports lay the scientific developments that sustained the Industrial Revolution. Technicians sought to perfect equipment. Athletes trained systematically to achieve their physical maximum. New games, like basketball, volleyball, and team handball, were consciously invented to specification as if they were new products for the market. As early as the late 17th century, quantification became an important aspect of sports, and the cultural basis was created for the concept of sports record. The word “record,” in the sense of an unsurpassed quantified achievement, appeared, first in English and then in other languages, only in the late 19th century.

Development of modern sports

The sociological terms used to describe the development of modern sports, such as secularization, rationalization, specialization, bureaucratization, and quantification, all suggest that the formal and structural characteristics specific to 20th-century sports are the characteristics of modern society generally. Although Marxist scholars contend that this development is the result of industrial capitalism, non-Marxists, adapting the sociological theories of the German Max Weber, the Frenchman Émile Durkheim, and the American Talcott Parsons and others, have observed that modern sports antedate industrial capitalism and have flourished in societies such as the former Soviet Union that had never known a “bourgeois” phase.

Economic analysis demonstrates that the boom in sports participation and in sports spectatorship has depended on the increase of leisure time for the masses. Capitalistic entrepreneurship certainly played a role in the rationalization of sports into a marketable commodity. But the transformation of traditional pastimes into modern sports took place in the schools and universities as well as in business and industry. Modern baseball was formulated by a group of New York City players, but modern soccer was invented in the elite boys' schools of Victorian England, while rowing and track-and-field athletics took their modern forms in English and American colleges and universities. The 19th century's combination of Christian ethics and rationalized forms is best symbolized by the birth of basketball in 1891 at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., a stronghold of “muscular Christianity.”

While England may be considered the homeland of modern sports, modern physical education can be traced back to German and Scandinavian developments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Men like Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths in Germany and Per Henrik Ling in Sweden elaborated systems of exercise that were eventually adopted by British, American, and other schools. These noncompetitive alternatives to modern sports, which also flourished in the form of central European gymnastic displays, did not develop great popularity with schoolchildren or college students. Almost universal in the late 19th century, such gymnastic systems have by and large been replaced by competitive sports—with or without the notion that sports can be a vehicle of ethical instruction. Gymnastic displays can still be witnessed in the disciplined mass formations that accompany major sports competitions, particularly in the countries of eastern Europe. Modern-day individual gymnastics is itself an outgrowth of the earlier European gymnastics form.

While commercial motives encouraged promoters to stage sports events open to all who had the price of admission, class solidarity and exclusiveness led to the invention of the amateur rule, originally formulated in the 1870s to prevent the participation of all those who worked with their hands. The spread of egalitarian ideals and the avarice of individual athletes has had little to do with the demise of amateurism. Rather, barriers to overt professionalization eroded with the realization that the highest levels of physical achievement (and the richest harvest of national and international championships) require expenditures of time and money incompatible with a primary commitment to work or study. Once a university's prestige or a nation's image became dependent upon stellar athletic performances, it was no longer possible to limit the pool of talent to the leisure class. Now that the modern Olympic Games are open to men and women who may earn millions of dollars by their athletic prowess, it is quite improbable that what remains of the Victorian concept of amateur sports as an avocation can endure. The line between amateurism and professionalism has changed through time and will continue to be a point of controversy in sports as long as amateurism, however defined, is a requirement in world competitions.

Sociological, psychological, and physiological aspects

Sociological factors

Although the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called attention to play as an aspect of culture in Homo Ludens (1938), his predilection for pageantry and for play tinged with religious ritual forced sociologists to devise alternative paradigms for the relationship of play to other activities.

Play can be conceptualized as either spontaneous or regulated. Regulated play—i.e.,games—can be contests, like poker, or noncompetitive activities, like leapfrog. Contests can be purely intellectual, like chess, or a combination of physical and intellectual aspects, like rugby.

Preliterate societies

Competition is such an integral part of Western civilization that some anthropologists and sociologists assume that all games must be contests and are led, therefore, to assert that many preliterate cultures lack games. This assertion is questionable, but many cultures, including some of the most complex, have sought to diminish competition and have favoured noncompetitive games. Such cultures, like those of the Indian subcontinent, have tended to lag behind in the adoption of modern Western forms of sport. There are reasons, however, to suspect that competitiveness may be a universal trait. In Bali, for instance, where Hinduism is the dominant religion, direct social conflict is avoided wherever possible, but the mediated contest of the traditional cockfight indirectly arrays family against family and village against village as the Balinese excitedly bet large sums on the cocks with which they passionately identify.

Most preliterate peoples have sports of one sort or another. As indicated above, these sports are frequently if not invariably associated with cult. The natives of the American Southwest played a stickball game in which the role of the shaman was as important as that of the stick wielders. African youths wrestled one another as part of their rites of passage into manhood. Greek myths like that of swift-footed Atalanta, who said she would marry anyone who could outrun her, testify that footraces as a form of courtship survived into archaic times. The tendency to separate sports from the rest of culture gains strength as the division of labour in society becomes more complex, but the association of sports with the rest of culture has never been lost. An athletic image is almost as useful to the modern politician as it was to Amenhotep II.

Political influence

Politics are in fact an integral aspect of modern sports despite the efforts of some idealists to separate the two. Political decisions determine which sports will be encouraged (traditional or modern), how much public support will be available to promote recreational and elite sports, if differences in gender, race, religion, or ideology will be the basis of discrimination in sports, whether or not athletes will be free to compete in this or that international competition. All of these decisions have prompted bitter controversies, some of which have raged for decades. In nations once colonized by the British, such as Barbados, enthusiasm for cricket is associated with the continued influence of a foreign culture. In the former Soviet Union, the Politburo had to decide how much money to allocate for national teams of athletes who enhanced the system's prestige and how much to devote to facilities that were used by the masses. Women and blacks struggled for decades to achieve integration into the white male preserve of American sports; Jews and Communists were suddenly expelled from German sports clubs in 1933 (on the initiative of the clubs, which anticipated the politics of the Nazi regime). The ostracism of racially segregated South Africa and the use of Olympic boycotts as a means of protest are prime examples of political decisions affecting participation in international sports events.

Mass-media influence

That hundreds of millions of people now play sports on a regular basis and equally large numbers watch the Olympic Games and soccer's World Cup on television has enormous economic consequences. Most of the world's governments now have ministries of sport that budget large sums to construct sports facilities and otherwise promote recreational sports for the masses. Such ministries cooperate closely with national sports federations to finance research into “sport science” and to field elite representative teams for international events. Where private enterprise is encouraged, entrepreneurs market equipment, operate commercial sports facilities, and sponsor tournaments. They and other companies purchase sports-related television advertisements that in the late 20th century cost into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute.

The development of modern sports has been entwined with the growth of modern mass media. Each depends upon the other. Sports pages and specialized sports journals began to appear in the early 19th century when men such as Pierce Egan in England began to write in the colourfully metaphoric, argot-rich prose now recognized everywhere as typical of sportswriters. Thousands of specialized magazines are published, and sports dailies such as L'Equipe (France) or the Gazzetta dello sport (Italy) are common in many countries but less so in the United States. In the early 20th century U.S. radio and German television pioneered in the development of live sports coverage. In the latter half of the century it became customary for private and public television networks to broadcast 500 or more hours of sports annually. Multiyear contracts for television rights have cost commercial networks as much as $1,000,000,000 or more. Rights to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul and Calgary, Alta., were sold for more than $600,000,000. The popularity of televised sports events guarantees that the networks will continue to budget enormous sums for the rights to cover them and that commercial sponsors or governmental agencies will continue to underwrite these costs.

Psychological and physiological factors

Motivational factors

The psychological aspects of sports are more difficult to assess because factors such as motivation are more difficult to measure than the size of an audience or the amount of a contract. The psychological tests that have been administered have produced such a welter of contradictory results that many specialists are ready to abandon the attempt to pinpoint motives. Some generalizations, however, seem tenable. On the whole, physical fitness and the desire for simple relaxation seem to motivate those who shun competitive sports in favour of noncompetitive physical activities such as jogging, hiking, recreational swimming, and aerobics (although the development of aerobics contests testifies to the protean nature of the competitive urge). Important to those who choose sports is the challenge of the contest, the opportunity to test one's physical and mental skills against another person, against nature, or against the abstraction of the sports record. The choice of one sport over another depends on the cultural availability of the sport (few Laotians play baseball), on social group (few truck drivers own polo ponies), on gender (women are not supposed to box), and on individual temperament (some people cannot enjoy golf). There is reason to believe that the distinction between team sports, which emphasize cooperation within the contest, and individual sports, which call for a greater sense of autonomy, is a fundamental one, although an individual may enjoy both.

Mental preparation

The will to win is a powerful motive, and individual athletes as well as coaches and administrators have studied such matters as the most efficient type of leadership and the optimal level of pregame stress. Psychologists differ among themselves, but some contend that democratic leadership produces greater individual satisfaction while authoritarian leadership provides “results” (i.e., a higher level of achievement and, consequently, more victories). Many psychological studies have shown that female athletes tend to attribute failure to their lack of effort or skill while male athletes point to external factors such as luck or the strength of the opposition. It has also been established that the ideal level of pregame stress falls between utter relaxation and hypertension and depends in part on the sport; successful archery, for instance, calls for less pre-match aggressiveness than rugby does. Athletes in many sports such as golf, tennis, diving, high jumping, and pole vaulting, where form and timing are crucial, often resort to a different method of pregame “psyching” called imaging or visualizing. This does not so much build aggressiveness as write a visual mental script to be followed in the contest to come.

Induced aggressiveness is, of course, a common technique, but “psyched-up” players can be a menace to themselves and others. Injuries are but one consequence. As the desire to win increases in intensity, especially when the players symbolically represent schools, cities, nations, races, religions, or ideologies, considerations of fair play are liable to be lost in the scuffle. In such situations aggressiveness on the field is often accompanied by violence in the stands, where crowd psychology operates (often in conjunction with alcohol) to reduce normal inhibitions on rowdy behaviour.

Crowd behaviour

Sports-related spectator violence is, however, often more strongly associated with social group than with the specific nature of the sport itself. Roman gladiatorial combats were, for example, history's most violent sport, but the closely supervised spectators, carefully segregated by social class and gender, rarely rioted. In modern times, association football is certainly less violent than rugby, but “soccer hooliganism” is a worldwide phenomenon, while spectator violence associated with the more upper-class but rougher sport of rugby has been minimal. Similarly, crowds at baseball games have been more unruly than the generally more affluent and better-educated fans of American football, although football is unquestionably the rougher sport. Efforts of the police to curb sports-related violence are often counterproductive because the young working-class males responsible for most of the trouble are frequently hostile to the authorities. Media coverage of disturbances can also act to exaggerate their importance and to stimulate the crowd behaviour simultaneously condemned and sensationalized, as is violence on the field. The frequent fights between National Hockey League players seem to be a consistent feature of sports highlights on television.

Drug usage

Drug abuse must be considered among the other unfortunate aspects of modern sports. The misuse of amphetamines, anabolic steroids, and other drugs has become a central problem of modern sports. One of the touted values of sports is that they better one's health. Pursued in moderation, they certainly do improve muscle tone, increase cardiovascular efficiency, and retard skeletal decalcification. When sports become an obsession, however, they tend ironically to have the opposite effect. The human body is thought of not as a part of the self but as the self's instrument, something to be used and abused. In pursuit of the absolute maximum achievement, 19th-century cyclists began to drug themselves with caffeine and strychnine; some died from the effects of the drugs. Modern chemistry has greatly enlarged the possibilities of artificial stimulation. In the late 20th century came widespread use of amphetamines and anabolic steroids. The former permit athletes to draw upon their physical reserves and continue despite the extremes of exhaustion until they collapse and, occasionally, die. Steroids are thought to increase muscle mass and muscular strength, but the side effects include damage to various organs and, in the case of women, masculinization (e.g., facial hair, deeper voices). Efforts of the International Olympic Committee to limit drug abuse have often been frustrated by national Olympic committees determined upon sports victories at any cost. Efforts to control drug abuse in professional sports and in intercollegiate athletics have frequently been countered by the athletes' concerns regarding personal privacy. Nevertheless, in the United States, codes of varying strictness have been imposed in different sports, part of which includes the requirement of periodic testing for drug use. Olympic athletes now undergo testing prior to participation.

Scientific training

Quite apart from drug abuse, publicly deplored even by some of the abusers, there is the trend to scientific training, which is practiced by most modern countries, and which Germany has developed to a high degree of expertise. While no one questions the instrumental efficiency of such training, there is reason to ask, as have neo-Marxist scholars, whether sports—once conceived as an alternative to work—have not become work's mirror image. The pervasive popularity of modern sports, for children as well as for adults, suggests that the answer must still be negative. Sports continue to be perceived as a domain of freedom unlike what most people experience at work. Almost everyone has experienced the joy of sports. Nevertheless, reflective observers will continue to ponder the pros and cons of the modern drive to instrumentalize the body and to rationalize sports in a quest for the ultimate possible athletic performance. 

Additional Reading

General works

History

Sports in modern society