An Athletics Compendium

TheUteratureof Athletics Americanprofessional foot-racinghad, in the nineteenthcentury,takena similar route to its British counterpart, via match-races and challenges involving time and distance, but no dense network of rural sports ever developed, though there were HighlandGames on EasternandWesternseaboards.Bythe thirdquarter of the century, the rapid developmentof the railway networkenabled the best runners to competein match-races,though the pedestriancarnival neverseems to havetaken firmroot. MostAmerican handicapand scratchfoot-races probablytook placein Highland Games. Lindsey's Cinder-path Tales (1900)providesa rare, tantalising glimpseof American professional foot-racing, which was ultimately engulfed by the amateur college movement.Similarly,an Americanwork, Mike Sweeney of the Hill (Putnam's 1940) draws apart the curtainon the HighlandGames of theEastern seaboardin the finalpart of the nineteenthcentury.By the 1920s, Americanprofessionalathleticshad vanished, leaving little in the formal literature. Jamieson's marvellous Powderhall and Pedestrianism takes us to 1943. After that, there is virtually no literature and our only windows on professional athletics are the yearlyScottish Games Association handbooks.The SGA, created justafter the Second WorldWar by the Edinburgh-based Tom Young,was a loose assemblyof ruralgames and pedestriancarnivals,anattempt to linkamoribundfoot-racingculturewith a looser, more vibrantHighlandGamesmovement, but was in no waysimilarin structure to club- basedamateurorganisations. Formed in 1976, the International Track Association (ITA) passed virtually unnoticed through the gut of professional athletics. American-based,it attempted an honest professionalisation of track and field athletics, hoping to attract to its ranks athletes from beyond the United States before the public tired of familiar facesdoing familiarthings.Alas,withintwo yearsit had vanished,havingfailedto add anything fresh or dynamic to the sport. It is unlikely that the ITA organisers knew much of the Australian State organisations, the Scottish Games Association, or of the history of professional athletics. In the end, the ITA turned out to be simply a badly planned, inadequatelyresourced andill-conceivedventure. It is,perhaps, not surprising that the secondhalf of the twentiethcentury has given us so little literature on professional foot-racing, for the sport has pursued a twilight existencesince the First WorldWar. Indeed, onlythe survivalof Powderhallhas given the sport an occasional prominence. TheScottish sprinter George McNeil's The Unique Double (1983), an account of his winningof the PowderhallSprint and the Australian Stawell'gift', is our only recordof a modern professionalfoot-racer. It deservesa much wider audience. Brian Lee's The Great Welsh Sprint: theStory of theWelsh PowderhallHandicap 1903-1934 (1999) is a recent publication. It is doubtful if a comprehensive historyof professionalfoot-racingwill everbe written, simplybecause so muchof it diedwiththe runners and coaches of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.Most of its records still lie in the cramped pagesof the ScottishGamesAssociation'syearbook.There, the historianwill findHarry Hutchens's marvellousthirty seconds for 300 yards in midwintergloom and the feats of Deerfoot [ xxxiv ]