An Athletics Compendium

The Uteratureof Athletics now overlapped with an older ruralsports tradition,typifiedby the Scottish and Lakeland Games. Both match-races and pedestrian carnivals such as those held at Sheffield and Powderhallwerefuelledbybetting.Bythe end of the nineteenthcentury,the latter had a substantial following, particularly in central Scotland and the industrial towns of the North. In Australia, the sport took a different path, for there no strongrural sports culture had developed. Instead, 'gift' handicapraces,often centred round miningcommunities (similarto Britishpedestriancarnivals),formed the spineof the professionalprogramme. This was not track and field athletics,for after a brieflate-nineteenth centuryflirtation with events such as high jumpand hurdles,the Australians settledfor a programmeof 'gift' events and occasional match-races. Two Australian works (unpublished in the United Kingdom) ProfessionalAthletics in Australia (PercyMasonand Rigby, 1985) and The Spiked Shoe (JoeBull,National Press, 1959)givea good account of the professionalsport in Australia, one sometimes plagued by a criminal element. Despite this, Australian professional running has survived in good condition until the end of the twentieth century, primarilybecauseof the integrityof its Stategoverningbodies. It is often said that British professionalfoot-racingdied of inherent corruption, and it is certainly true that in the late nineteenth century major handicaps such as Sheffield lost the confidence of the public, and that the Hutchens-Gent match-race fiasco of Lillie Bridge in 1887 hastened the decline of professional foot-racing in southern England. It would, however, be more accurate to say that the sport declined primarily becauseit failedto form strong, ethicalnationalassociations to regulatea betting-based sport. For, though racing had its Jockey Club and soccer its Football Association (organisationsembracingboth amateurand professionalcodes)professionalfoot-racing failed,at its peak, to form a strong professional body,or to be embraced by existing amateur associations. Another centralproblemfor professional foot-racingwas that, even at its zenith, it rarely offered its best athletes anythingapproaching a good income. Leading runners soon ran out of match-racesconductedon a scratchbasisand rarely won any of the major handicaps.There were, it is true, occasional 'championship' races, but they had little status and rarelyoffered big prizes. Such races also exposed the true form of the top professional runner, putting him at the mercy of the handicapper and limiting his competitive options in match-races. The major handicap races, such as Edinburgh's Powderhall Handicap, were more often won by less gifted athletes, men specially prepared by trainers who helped them 'find' yards in the seclusion of remote training quarters. It is not, therefore, surprising that in the boom years of the early 1860s the impresarioGeorgeMartinwas, evenwithgreat runnerssuch asDeerfoot and JackWhite ('The GatesheadClipper') in hisstable,forced to trekhis tatterdemalion circusof athletes around the country.Similarly,it is not surprisingthat, a quarter of a centurylater,W.G. [ xxxii J