An Athletics Compendium

Thelateratureof Athletics The first substantial account of amateur athletics is H. F. Wilkinson's Modem Athletics (1868).Wilkinson providesa listof amateurand professionalrecords,but, like most subsequenthistorians, showslittleinterest in pedestrianismor rural sports. Here I wouldobserve that, as in most of the worksof this period, the professional records in fieldevents are incomplete, givinglittle senseof the rich, highly-competitive nature of Lakeland and Scottish Highland and Border Games. Two decades later, Montague Shearman's monumental Athletics and Football (1887) provides an understandably more comprehensiveaccount of amateurathletics' earlyyears, but again,like Wilkinson, he fails to pay much attention to the depth and density of the professional sport. Amateurismruled. Almost forgotten, but ranking with Shearman's work, is The Pedestrian's Record (1890) by the Lupton brothers, an earlyattempt to link athletics trainingwith science. They dismissBarclay'smethods as 'calculatedto senda man to the graverather than the cinder path', echoinga generalrejection by university-basedamateurs of the Captain's regimes. The Pedestrian'Ks ecordis a work of great vision,in whichthe Luptons recommend the creation of a 'Jockey Club' of athletics,embracing both amateur and professional codes.Had this beenenacted at thisearly period in the sport's development, then the historyof worldathleticswould havetaken a quite different path. McCombie Smith's The Athletes and Athletic Sports of Scotland (1891) takes an understandably more critical viewof the amateur movement than either Wilkinson or Shearmanand provides us with a rareglimpse of nineteenthcenturyprofessional Scottish Highland Games. Like the Luptons, McCombie Smith was a radical, making strong recommendations on meet presentation and more accurate measurement and he is rigorousin his assessmentof Scottish jumpingand throwingperformances. Three other works,Donaldson's Men of Muscle (1901),Miller's Scottish Sports and How toExcel in Them (1910)and Sutherland's privatelypublished ScientificAthletics (1912) revealthe strengthof Scottish ruralathletics immediatelyprior to the Great War. Alas, there is no work of similar depth on Lakeland athletics, except possibly Machell's Some Recordsof theAnnual GrasmereSports (1911),whichlacks technicalcontent. The firstmajor work of the twentiethcentury on the ancient Olympics,Gardiner's GreekAthletic Sportsand Festivals (1910), wasof such quality as to leave littleroom for later writers. For Gardiner's is a ravishing work, of immense erudition and intelligence, containinga greaterrangeof visualmaterialthan most Olympic workswhichfollowedit. Technicalworks of the last quarterof the nineteenthcentury reflectthe limited nature of competitive athleticsinBritainat the time,understandablein that the AAAhad existedfor less than twentyyears,and that the bulkof competitionoutsideof the leading universities consisted of running-based handicap meetings. Not surprisingly, the first substantial technical books came from the United States, where the collegiate competitive structurewas beginningto catch up witha strong East Coast club system. The most impressive of these early works was Mike Murphy's Athletic Training (1914).Murphy, who died in 1913, wasthe inventor of the crouch start, coach to the 1912 UnitedStates Olympic team, and father to the Hollywood actor George Murphy.The author of a second book, Athletics in Theory and Practice (1913) was the Swede Ernest [xvi ]