Athletics and Football (extract)

68 ATHLETICS CHAPTER III. RUNNING AND RUNNERS. ALL must agree that running, walking,and leaping are the most simple and genuine of all competitions. When a Derby is won it is alwaysa point for argument whether the greater credit is due to the horse or to the jockey; and when Cambridge is badly beaten over the Putney course there is alwaysthe critic to say that the Oxford weightswere better arranged, that erratic steering threw away the race, or that the losers were under- boated. The athlete who winsa big race owes nothing to his apparatus, and his successcan only be due to his ownexcellence or his opponent's shortcomings. And even if running be more unsociablethan rowing, it has the counterbalancing advantage for the individual that his success cannot possibly be ascribed to others. In every eight on the river there is said to be one duffer, and every one of the eight can be certain that someone considershim to be the man. In athletics a ' duffer' can only win by the help of a handicap ; the cause of his success is then evident, and if he gets the prizehe takes little credit with it. When the athlete has got a pair of the best shoes, a zephyr, and a pair of silk or merino drawers (called by courtesy knickerbockers) just not coming down to the knee, so as to leave that usefulportion of the leg free, he has got all the stock- in-trade required to win half-a-dozen championships. The science of athletics, then, consists in the scientific use of the limbs ; the tools of the athlete's trade are the thewsand muscles of his own body, which God has made and man cannot re­ fashion. Of the athlete, therefore, it can be said,more than of