An Athletics Compendium

TheUteratureof Athletics consists of unexceptional descriptive and prescriptive material on the events of the Games. Its mainfocus of interest for athleticshistorianslies in twoother areas. The first is in a list of the performancesof hitherto little-knownathletessuch as the all-round jumperJames Speedie(six feet three incheshigh jump1911) andGeorge Murray(twenty-threefeet nine inches long jump,1907).Sutherland'sperformancelists, though probablyfar from complete,show a ScottishGames cultureat its peak, teeming with jumpersand throwersof highcalibre,several capableof winningOlympicmedals. The second elementof interest in Scientific Athletics is Sutherland'spersonaltraining diary,which givesa detailedaccount of his trainingfrom the age of eleven until 1912, when he was twentyyears of age.Sutherland, basedin the Rogart area of Sutherland, followedas a boyan all-roundprogrammeof running,throwingand jumpingthat would find favourwith anymodern coach. By the age of twenty, at a bodyweightof onlyten stone ten pounds, he had launched the sixteen pound shafted hammer to a massive hundred and twentyfeet and the shot to forty-eight feet ten inches. Sutherland'sdiary is a moving account of a young farm labourer's slow, lonely passage towards athletics success.He appears to haveconfined most of his competitive lifeto the remoteRogart area and consequently never competed against A. A. Cameron or the other leading Scottishthrowersof the period.There is no recordof WilliamSutherland beyond1912 and it seemslikelythat he perishedin the Great War. J.J. Miller's Scottish Sports and How toExcel inThem (1908)coverssimilarground to ScientificAthletics. LikeSutherland'sbook, it is short on prescriptiveadvice, but contains in-depthbiographicalaccounts of the Scottishthrowersof the 1850-1912period.Miller's book is significantfor its failureto contain a singlementionof the greatDonaldDinnie, akinto a historyof prizefightingwithout referenceto John L. Sullivan. Fortunately,DavidWebsterandGordon Dinnie's definitivebiographyof Dinnie DonaldDinnie:theFirstSportingSuperstar (1999)has recentlyappeared,and showsDonald Dinnie to be a giant of nineteenth centuryathletics,and probably the greatestall-round wrestlerof his era. The periodfrom Scientific Athletics to thepresent dayhas produced severalworks, but, apart fromthe Dinnie biography,none of thesehas addedmuchof substance to our knowledge. Though outside the scope of this guide, an exception is Redmond's The HighlandGames in theUnitedStates whichprovidesour maininsight into the development of Scottish Games in the USA. Redmond makesit clear that the Games provided the basis for the American Inter-Collegiate programme, which had its origins in the universitiesof the East Coast. It is, therefore, hardlysurprisingthat the AAUhandbook of 1945 contains detailed rules for such Celtic events as hitch and kick and the 561b weightthrow for heightand distance. More surprising is the inclusion of similarlydetailed rules for the potato race, the three-legged race, the sack raceand a running high jump from a springboard! By1920, with a generationof youngmen lost in foreignfields,the ScottishBorder Games were all but dead, English LakelandGames were fadingand even the Highland Games would never return to their former glory. As with pedestrianism,rural sports [xxiii ]